It is an anxiety-provoking time for the tens of thousands of newly laid-off workers now entering the job market amid inflationary pressures and fears of recession. As they search for new jobs, they face fewer openings, hiring freezes and competition from all the other sudden unemployed.
The change in mood is palpable.
Pleasanton resident Nilesh Bhandare, 39, was a data engineer at Twitter. He was shocked that his post was cut during the purge of half the staff by new owner Elon Musk last week, as Bhandare’s job was an integral part of the company’s business.
He has seen a dramatic turnaround in what is available in the job market. While many recruiters have approached him, only around 20% focus on full-time positions. Others are looking for contractors – who can be fired more easily. The last time he looked for a job, the situation was reversed, with a preponderance of full-time positions.
“My view is that no one wants to commit full-time now because companies are unsure of the economic situation,” Bhandare said.
Online job postings clearly depict the slowdown. In January, there were 41,718 tech job openings in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area, according to data that job search site ZipRecruiter pulled from thousands of websites. By November 1, that had plunged to 27,919 – down by a third. The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro also fell by a third, from 28,421 tech job openings on Jan. 1 to 18,748 on Nov. 1.
“We’ve seen labor market conditions deteriorate very significantly in one slice of the labor market,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “The pain is concentrated in a narrow set of industries: technology, real estate and finance, primarily.”
Unsurprisingly, ZipRecruiter’s surveys of job seekers showed declining confidence. At the same time, more people than ever are looking for positions with more intensity. For example, there’s an increase in those searching daily rather than logging in once in a blue moon, Pollak said.
Jake Schneider, 29, also got a before and after look at the hiring market.
He was laid off in late October from a job as a technical recruiter at Santa Monica’s Recharge, which makes payment software for subscription services.
Earlier this year, while still employed, he sent out a slew of CVs and had an 80% response rate from companies asking to schedule interviews. Now, even though he applies for about 10 opens a day, only about 20% want to set a time to chat, he said.
Of course, recruiting jobs are often the first casualties in downturns.
“We are the canary in the coal mine,” Schneider said. “Our main job is to fill roles and if there are no roles to fill, we are not needed.”
For other types of tech roles, many job seekers say there are still opportunities, but it remains to be seen if they will materialize.
Wren Turkal of San Jose was a staff site reliability engineer at Twitter and is in the later stages of his career.
Within days of her layoff, she discovered that there were still good jobs out there, but the job market definitely seemed softer.
“We’ll see what happens: are companies really hiring or are they going to pull the plug?” she says. “Nobody really knows until they have an offer.”
She’s heard from “a ton” of recruiters, both agency headhunters and corporate recruiters, “which tells me there’s definitely some interest out there.”
But she found Twitter’s severance package woefully inadequate and, as the primary breadwinner, “I have to take care of my family,” she said. His partner, Rachel Turkal, has just launched a small bakery, Browned Butter Babe.
Their son, Aerik, 13, does gymnastics and she doesn’t want to compromise his ability to continue, as well as stay in his Mandarin immersion program in the Cupertino school district.
All of the layoffs — and the increased competition — “make me think, for sure,” she said. “There is always a supply/demand problem; if there is more supply, it makes the situation worse. I am definitely worried about this.
Overall, she feels she can’t get a pearl on the economy.
“A lot of stuff is being played, which makes it really hard to know how bad it will be,” she said. “There is a lot of uncertainty.”
Despite the slowdown in technology, Pollak and other experts said it was only correcting a sharp increase in recent years.
“A lot of these tech-related companies have grown faster than almost anywhere else because the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of everything and triggered extremely favorable conditions” for interest rates and funding, Pollak said. .
Although the layoffs seem huge, they simply set the clock back a few months for many companies that have grown rapidly. Meta, for example, recently averaged 15,000 additional employees per year, so the 11,000 jobs cut last week only bring it back to its headcount from the start of the year, Pollak said.
Boulder Creek resident Marc Weil, 35, was an engineering manager at Stripe in San Francisco, a digital payments giant. It’s the first time he’s been fired, “a rite of passage, I guess,” he said. He was surprised that big companies such as Netflix (which laid off in May and June) only posted three vacancies for engineering managers. “It was weird; you would expect them to always need to hire new people due to attrition. »
Yet he heard from early-stage and mid-stage companies, and their venture capitalists, that they are still hiring.
“Technology has always been an up and down cycle,” Weil said. “But roller coasters are really stressful.”
Some people who were in the early rounds of layoffs have already landed jobs, but even they are pessimistic about the market.
San Francisco resident Tyler Deng, 29, was part of the product operations team at Tempo, a smart home/fitness company that grew rapidly during the pandemic and laid off employees in early October.
“Right now is not the best time to look for a job; before the fourth quarter, nobody knows what is certain,” he said. “Is it better to apply now or do I have to wait until January?”
The unsettling climate could last even once someone lands a job. “I’ve heard horror stories of companies having to cancel offers or being fired a month after hiring.”
But in the end, he found a new job starting this week, comparable to his role at Tempo.
Yet he worries about the economy.
“It’s a vicious circle,” he says. “If people are laid off, they reduce their expenses. This makes other companies suffer more and becomes a domino effect.
Carolyn Said is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
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