Elizabeth Renter
Appearances
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Well, we know that people base much of what they think about the economy at large on their own personal experiences, and the labor market is a massive part of the overall economy. You know, when you think about our personal experiences within the labor market, you might think about how long we've been at our job or how we feel about our pay and benefits and how these things change with time.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
or our experiences when we're searching for a new job. And interestingly, all of these things are also important on a macro level when interpreting the health of the labor market. But our personal experiences go beyond the data. We might gauge satisfaction with our pay increases on whether it feels like we're able to increasingly buy more stuff or better afford the stuff we have.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
But it can also be influenced by what we hear and see on social media or in our social circles.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Yeah. So we've come through a really interesting transition over the last, say, four years, which makes this a great time to talk about the labor market. Towards the end of the initial months of the pandemic, workers had the upper hand and could find a new, perhaps better paying job relatively easily. That's because the demand for labor or workers outweighed the supply or the number of workers.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
So companies had to compete for them. This showed up in the data as high quits rates and high hiring rates as people turned over in jobs. Now, however, things have shifted. In part because of the Federal Reserve's campaign to slow inflation, the labor market has cooled, and labor supply and labor demand are in better balance.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
So in the data, that appears as lower hiring rates, lower quits rates, and also fewer job openings.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
That's a great follow-up question to what I was just talking about. Because that cooler labor market means people are feeling kind of stuck. It feels worse now than it did then. It's more difficult to find work now than it was just a few years ago. So more workers are pessimistic. which is showing up in popular measures of consumer sentiment, like the survey from the conference board, for example.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
People believe it's less likely they'll be able to find a replacement job if they lose theirs, and they're putting a greater likelihood on the chance of losing their jobs. Both insights from the New York Fed.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And one stat that I always go back to is a 4% unemployment rate is about 7 million workers that are out of work. So even though 4% is quote unquote relatively low, try the telling that to the 7 million people looking for jobs. And I think making that connection is human nature.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
We fielded a survey last summer that found people consider their personal experiences and that of the people around them when they're judging the health of the economy. And that likely extends to their perceptions of the health of the labor market.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
So even if I'm personally happy in my job, I might have people in my friend circle or my LinkedIn network that are experiencing the labor market firsthand and having a hard time. So even their perceptions are going to shape my opinion.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
That's a tough one. When it comes to individual perception or sentiment, I'm not sure we can ever truly know this. I think it's a highly individualized set of circumstances, and I think it likely varies from person to person.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
So I found this part really interesting. About half of employed Americans said their pay increases have kept up with inflation over the past five years. I assumed it would be less, despite knowing that pay on average has kept pace with inflation by many measures. And younger people were surprisingly more likely to say their pay has kept up.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
One possible explanation for this is that younger workers are earlier in their careers and therefore more likely to experience faster wage growth. Also, they're more likely to be employed in industries that saw particularly high wage growth over the past five years, industries such as leisure and hospitality, for example.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
How has that changed over time? Well, we found that 47% of Americans have interacted with the job market, either actively seeking a new job or passively exploring opportunities within the past 12 months. And this rate is highest among Gen Z, the youngest generation that we surveyed, which makes sense as they're more likely to be just entering the professional world.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
And this means the younger workers are more likely to be having firsthand experiences with the job market. While older people might be informed about the labor market, younger folks are going to have more boots on the ground information shaping their perspectives.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
About one third of Americans have actively sought a job in the past 12 months. And by and large, most were looking because they were just ready for a new opportunity. A smaller share were looking because they were actually unemployed. And this is interesting because we hear a lot about how young people have been having a particularly difficult time in the current job market.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
And it could be because of their new entrance. What I mean is if I look for a job, personally, if I look for a job, there's a good chance I'm doing so while employed, right? And even if I lose my job, my resume still lists plenty of experience at this age.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Whereas younger folks are more likely to be new to the job market, so they have less experience and they're not beginning from a place of job or financial security. So when we see low hiring rates, as we do now, this is going to impact new entrants to the labor force more dramatically.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Yes, I recall it being no fun, but unlike older professionals like myself, younger folks aren't going to know the experience of heading to the mall to fill out applications at the food court or dropping off their resume physically at local businesses. It's a totally different world, but there are different challenges. And I think most of us have anecdotally heard of job seekers being ghosted.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Well, we found that 27% of active job seekers have been ghosted in the past 12 months. That is, they were in contact with a hiring manager or recruiter at some point, and that person stopped responding. Furthermore, we found 41% of active job seekers applied for a job and never received any response, so their application wasn't even acknowledged.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
While 78% of Americans think that technology has made looking for a job easier, just 64% think it's made getting hired easier. And, you know, that tracks. You don't have to leave your home to apply for a job now, right? So all else being equal, you can identify and apply to more. There's just a lower barrier to entry.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
But this also means you might be more likely to apply to jobs when you're a little uncertain about whether it's actually a good fit for you. The issue is, it's made applying that much easier for everyone. So employers are handling way more applicants than ever, and you're likely in competition with more candidates than you would have been 10 or 20 years ago.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
The effects of this could be as far-reaching as employers trying to manage the flow of applicants by filtering them, not responding to all of them, or completely dropping the ball on some of them. They may also make the application and interview process more difficult.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
One thing that I think is worth mentioning in hopes some recruiters or employers might be listening is that job seekers pointed out some inconsistencies in job listings that could be preventing these employers from finding the right person. I mean, a better job match is good for all parties involved, but 14% of job seekers found discrepancies in posted salary ranges in the past 12 months.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
13% found out during the interview process that the actual job duties were different from what was advertised. And 12% found out the job was a contract rather than full-time employment gig. So I think correcting on these things would smooth the process both for job seekers and the people hoping to hire them.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Well, the data tells us where we've been rather than where we're going, and where we've been is definitely clearer right now. The most recent labor market data, the jobs report on the 7th and the jolts on the 11th, both indicate that the labor market was most recently on pretty solid footing. The economy is adding jobs at a healthy rate, and unemployment remains relatively low.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
The hiring and quits rates have stabilized, so they're no longer falling, and layoffs remain low and steady. So that was the January and February picture. These data sources haven't yet captured what we've been seeing in the federal workforce. You know, a slight decline that we saw in government employment in the February data was more likely a matter of a hiring freeze and natural attrition.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
But I can say with pretty decent certainty that the data we get in the next month will show some real effects of federal layoffs. And beyond that, there are additional potential risks on the horizon. Federal layoffs will impact certain industries, but tariffs and general economic uncertainty could stand to impact the labor market on a broader scale.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Always a pleasure. And thank you, Ana.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
Hey, Ana. Thanks for having me. It's always a great discussion.