The résumé sits unfinished in a Google Doc. The LinkedIn tab stays open, untouched. For millions of American workers, the search for something better has ground to a halt — not because the jobs aren t there, but because they ve done the math.
The door, it turns out, is barely open. More than half of U.S. workers — 53%, according to a new Glassdoor poll of over 1,300 professionals — say they have paused their job search entirely to protect their mental health.
It’s a figure that captures something economists rarely quantify: the exhaustion tax. The St. Louis Fed has since quantified it: as of late 2025, the hiring rate had fallen to 3.3% — just 0.5 percentage points above the all-time low recorded during the depths of the Great Recession in June 2009. The firing rate, meanwhile, sat at a historically low 1.1%.
Workers aren’t stupid. They know that there’s nowhere to go right now. The quits rate — the single best proxy for worker confidence in labor mobility — dropped to 1.9% in late 2025, tying cycle lows. Americans now believe they have only a roughly 45% chance of finding a new role within three months — a figure lower than during the peak of the COVID pandemic in December 2020, per Federal Reserve Bank of New York data.
What You Need to Know
- Source: Fortune
- Published: May 14, 2026 at 14:00 UTC
- Category: Business
- Topics: #fortune · #business · #economy · #fed
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Curated by GlobalBR News · May 14, 2026
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