Almost three-quarters of US workers think now’s a bad time to find a quality job

The “great resignation,” when millions of Americans quit their jobs during Covid in pursuit of greener pastures, now feels very long ago.

Indeed, confidence in the job market has sunk in recent years, per a new Gallup workplace survey, with only 28% of workers saying that now is a good time to find a quality job, down from 70% a little under four years ago.

College-educated workers — a group that had been slightly more optimistic than other demographics until last year — are now feeling particularly pessimistic about the job market, with only 19% of respondents saying that now is a good time to find a quality job, compared to 35% of workers without a college degree.

The latest results “point to a workforce that is restless but largely stuck. Many workers who want to leave cite economic constraints — from pay and benefits to the difficulty of finding a comparable role — as the primary barriers to making a move,” Gallup said in the report.

As the poll tracked job confidence up until the end of last year, the results don’t yet reflect the consequences of the recent geopolitical turmoil. Indeed, it seems more likely that the malaise could be a reflection of weak hiring across white-collar fields, concerns about AI automation, and high-profile layoffs in both the private and public sectors. March’s Conference Board report had the highest share of workers still seeing jobs as “hard to get” in more than five years, despite more people seeing jobs as “plentiful.”