Worker Types, AI Exposure and the Recent Decline in Job-Finding Rates

🎯 Impact Sentiment: Neutral

📋 Summary

• A Richmond Fed economic brief (EB 26-26) finds the recent drop in U.S. job-finding rates is concentrated, not spread evenly across the labor force.
• “Primary” workers with stable employment histories — about 55% of the labor pool — saw job-finding rates fall 13 percentage points from a November 2022 peak to a September 2025 trough, versus 2 points for secondary workers.
• Since 2023, workers in occupations highly exposed to AI (using a patent-based exposure measure) have seen larger declines in job-finding than less-exposed occupations.
• The pattern differs from a typical recession, when secondary workers usually absorb most of the cyclical hit.

💡 JR Insights

• 💼 Implication: Even people with steady careers can take longer to land the next role if their occupation overlaps with AI-automatable tasks.
• 🚨 Risk: A long search after a layoff can look like a personal failure when it is partly a sector-wide hiring freeze in exposed fields.
• ✨ Takeaway: If you are in an AI-exposed occupation, start a search earlier, widen the title set, and show how you use AI so you are not screened as a replaceable task-doer.