When Kate Porter lost her digital marketing job last spring, one of many laid off by Fidelity, she thought it would take a few months to find her next gig. After all, she survived a similar 2018 downsizing, that one at Office Depot, just fine.
Nothing prepared her for the icy-cold experience of her recent hunt. It got so bad that she characterized the five-month gap as “Job Market Hunger Games” on her LinkedIn profile, highlighting such skills as “hair loss management” and “ghost whispering: Interpreting eerie silences.”
She kept up with her professional networks and job-seeking buddies, all of them slammed with relentless “We’ve decided to move forward with other candidates” emails.
Yet the media kept reporting on the country’s strong hiring market.
“Every time one of those rosy job reports would come out, it felt so odd, like we were all just wandering through the career Twilight Zone,” she tells Marketing Daily. “It took a while to hit me – this is a white-collar recession, and the worst job market since 2007.”
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She’s not wrong. Business Insider reports that within tech, for example, the number of marketing jobs has fallen 23% since 2018. The Wall Street Journal and Fortune are also covering the white-collar blues.
And while periods of unemployment have never been fun, algorithmic job hunts hurt worse: Applicants often don’t hear back on jobs they’re perfect for. In fact, up to 20% of those openings are made up, according to Greenhouse, a job-finding platform, invented by companies trying to scare current employees into higher productivity or appear as if they are in growth mode.
New research from LinkedIn finds that it’s not just marketing that has a gloomy outlook, but all positions. While 54% of people plan on job hunting this year, 49% say the experience has gotten harder. LinkedIn reports that the number of applicants per open jobs jumped to 2.5 in 2024, up from 1.5 in 2022.
And 26% of those in the LinkedIn survey believe the job market in their field is so bad that they don’t even plan to look this year.
A large part of 2024’s job-hunting misery, says Chris Ross, a partner in Gartner’s CMO practice, stemmed from election and economic uncertainty, with companies scrutinizing headcount and delaying new hires.
Then, uncertainty about the new administration set in, with questions about tariffs, corporate tax rates and the stock market.
“At the same time, there are also massive changes in marketing, with some predictions calling for a 50% drop in search volume,” he tells Marketing Daily. Will TikTok exist? How about the Post Office? “All that dramatically impacts the kind of people a marketing organization needs most.”
Another factor is that remote work and willingness to work freelance, or “fractionally,” has been a hiring game changer. “There are so many options to work with really great people that marketers can afford to take their time about full-time, permanent hires,” Ross adds.
It doesn’t help that all marketers are finding themselves less valuable in the corporate hierarchy. “Marketing budgets are under tremendous pressure, which means every part of the marketing department has to work harder to prove their value,” Ross says.
Marketers are especially worried about AI, with a recent survey from Gartner finding that 89% of marketers are concerned about layoffs at their company. They’re right to be worried. Another Gartner study found that 26% of marketing leaders plan on reducing staff due to GenAI.
Marketing’s new archetypesFor CMOs, the hiring prospects “feel very healthy,” says Jennifer Doidge, leader of Russell Reynold Associate’s North American CMO practice. “If you are a CMO who is tech-enabled, and you understand how AI and technology are going to change marketing, it's a busy market for you,” she says.
But for those in lower managerial and junior levels, there are struggles as organizations figure out their new marketing roadmap.
The hiring process isn’t necessarily getting slower, she tells Marketing Daily, “but it has gotten more complex. It’s not as black and white as saying, 'We need a brand marketer’ or 'We need somebody who's great in performance.’ The archetypes are changing.”
Porter’s frankness about her situation -- with posts like “networking like my mortgage depends on it (because it does)” -- led to her next gig. She is gratefully settling into her new role as director of digital strategy at Synapse, a digital transformation agency.
And she’s hoping unemployed marketers will be more candid. “It’s brutal out there, and we need to be honest. I tried to look super put-together for a while, and then I was like, 'This is real. This is something we need to talk about,’” she says. “It helps when we all act a bit more human.”
Other job-hunting tips? They are as cliché das ever. Add new skills. Brush up on tech. Network. Think outside your category. And bulk up that savings account now, because job searches will take longer than you think.
And obvious as it sounds, Gartner’s Ross hopes job hunters will do everything they can to present themselves as marketers who can build businesses: “Customer acquisition and demand generation never go out of style.”