On a bright Thursday afternoon, four women walked along Sheridan Road, the Lighthouse Landing to their left. Amid the soft crash of waves against the lakeshore rocks, Evanston resident Ashley Bryan asked, “If your work life could be described as a song, what would it be?”
Erika Martinez said her song would be a DJ mix with a “crazy” rhythm followed by silence. Martinez was one of about 425 Northwestern staff laid off following the federal funding freeze last spring.
The group made their way around NU Lakefill and back to Lighthouse Beach, discussing both frustrations with the job market and hopes for the future.
Walking Club, organized by Bryan as a call for people to “get off LinkedIn,” aims to connect job seekers with others who are also navigating the job search process.
Before last July, Martinez was an evaluator at Feinberg School of Medicine, where she designed surveys and analyzed feedback data for some of the medical school’s classes. For the last eight months, she has been unable to find work, while having two children in college, she said.
“Getting together with other women, who may have been raising children for a long time and now have been incorporated into the labor market but then suddenly cut off again, helps you to know that there is nothing wrong with you, but it’s a general situation you are navigating,” Martinez said.
She said she has applied to about 100 jobs. The sheer number of rejections and the lack of responses has made her feel like she is not good enough for any position at all, she said.
Bryan echoed this sentiment.
“The job market right now is really tumultuous, to say the least, and searching for jobs can be really isolating,” Bryan said.
After being laid off from her job as a communications manager at Allstate in January, Bryan was certified to be a career coach through NU Executive Leadership and Organizational Change coaching program and decided to pursue it full time.
She said human connection in the job-search process is necessary for face-to-face mutual support.
Despite widespread frustration among job seekers, the unemployment rate remains relatively low nationwide at 4.3%.
Experts have attributed this to a “low-hire, low-fire” employment economy, where employers are neither actively hiring nor letting go of current employees.
One of the most notable causes of frustration is the lack of a “human feedback loop,” Bryan said. Applicants apply to a large number of jobs in a short period of time and are discouraged by an immediate “no” from an automated system.
Kati Lechner, a learning and organizational change master’s student, said generative artificial intelligence has played a large role in reducing human input in the hiring process.
“There’s this arms race about who’s going to scale faster and who’s going to use AI better,” she said.
Lechner said she has seen recruiters use AI to write job descriptions, candidates use AI to write their applications and AI make decisions about who deserves an interview.
Beyond AI, she said she has seen many companies include skills or responsibilities in job descriptions that often have nothing to do with the role.
“I want my architect to have training in architecture. I want my surgeon to be a doctor,” Lechner said. “But for most of our jobs, we (just) need to know that somebody can do it. Not that they’ve checked these particular boxes.”
Although Lechner is not currently looking for a job, she said she has heard the complaints expressed by Walking Club participants repeated by her friends.
“The answer is everybody’s got to slow down,” she said. “They’ll be more in touch.”
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