Finding a Job May Take a Little Longer for New Graduates

September 25, 2025

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Finding a new job has become increasingly harder for unemployed workers in recent years, as they experience longer unemployment in a low-turnover labor market.

Worker turnover—the rate at which an employee leaves a company over a certain time period and is replaced by someone new—has declined sharply from its 2022 peak, according to Goldman Sachs Research.

The chart below shows hiring and quits rates in the JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data have declined and stabilized below pre-pandemic levels, while the layoffs rate hasn’t changed much despite the recent slowdown in payroll growth.

Hiring and quits rates are below 2019 levels

_{Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, Department of Labor}

This low-hire, low-fire pattern has raised concerns that the unemployed, especially new graduates, might be increasingly locked out of the job market.

Here’s a closer look at Goldman Sachs Research’s analysis.

Changes in worker turnover have been mostly cyclical in nature

To understand recent trends in the total turnover rate, Goldman Sachs Research looked at its two components: Job reallocation and churn.

Job reallocation measures the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed in the economy as recorded in the Business Employment Dynamics data.
Churn measures worker flows between existing jobs, rather than hiring for expansion or firing for contraction of a firm’s workforce.

While job reallocation has been on a decline since the late 1990s, our analysts find that the churn rate has driven almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession. Though churn was extremely high in 2022, it’s now significantly lower than in 2019, accounting for nearly all of the decline in total worker turnover since then.

Given that churn closely tracks the overall health of the labor market, Goldman Sachs Research suggests that the changes in turnover in recent years have been mostly cyclical in nature.

The decline in churn relative to its pre-pandemic levels is broad-based across industries and states

Goldman Sachs Research finds that worker flows have slowed down more sharply in four sectors:

Construction
Leisure and hospitality
Professional services
Retail trade

Historically, these are also the sectors where workers transition more frequently across jobs.

Goldman Sachs Research finds that workers who lose their jobs in industries where there’s a larger decline in churn tend to experience longer periods of unemployment.

Churn is well below pre-pandemic levels in most industries

_{Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, Department of Labor}

A similar pattern also emerges at the state level: In states where turnover has slowed down more, periods of unemployment currently last longer.

Younger workers impacted

Goldman Sachs Research finds that the consequences of lower turnover mostly fall on younger workers.

In the states with the largest drops in churn since 2019, workers aged 16 to 35—both new entrants and previously employed—remain unemployed for around two weeks longer relative to the pre-pandemic period. This translates into an average of 12 weeks to find a job versus 10 weeks in 2019.

_{Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, Department of Labor}

According to our analysts, these results suggest that while the increases in unemployment duration associated with lower turnover are a reason for concern and another sign that the labor market has softened especially for younger workers, at least for now they remain relatively modest.

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