The Tinder-ization of the job market
Why nobody's getting hired in a "good" economy
Is AI going to take everyone’s jobs? A recent report went viral after claiming there were 55,000 AI-related layoffs in 2025.
On the one hand, this is fairly silly. Fifty-five thousand layoffs is a very small number in a country with a 170 million-person labor force, where monthly layoffs regularly exceed 1.5 million. In fact, 2025 has had an unusually low layoff rate by historical standards, albeit higher than other recent years.
But on the other hand, there are real concerns about specific subsectors. For example, translators are experiencing real competition from AI, resulting in lower wages. A recent paper estimated that early-career workers in the most AI-exposed industries have seen a 16% reduction in employment relative to those in the least exposed industries.
“Relative” is an important word. A 16% relative decrease in payrolls in one sector doesn’t imply that fewer workers are employed overall. It could just as well be the case that AI-exposed sectors reduced payrolls by 8% while nonexposed sectors increased theirs by 8% (or that nonexposed sectors increased them by 16%!).
While recent college graduates have seen a decrease in employment, the timeline does not match the AI rollout, as Will Raderman noted for Employ America. Similarly, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio (a measure of labor market health that incorporates shifts in labor market participation) has been more or less constant for the last three years.
So far, we’re not seeing a job apocalypse, where AI wipes out white collar work overnight. If you’re looking for AI’s fingerprints on the economy, the place to look isn’t the unemployment rate, it’s the hiring rate. AI may not have collapsed unemployment, but it has turned job seeking into a modern dating nightmare.
How AI turned the job market into a dating app
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