Amazon and Target layoffs throw thousands into sluggish job market
The thousands of workers laid off by Amazon and Target last month are going to face an unusually slow job market for hiring.
One in five U.S. employers said in August that they planned to slow hiring in the second half of 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal and the Conference Board surveys. This is nearly double the rate of companies that planned to bring on fewer people at the same time last year.
Within the retail industry, job postings are down 12 percentage points from pre-Covid levels, according to Laura Ullrich, Indeed’s director of economic research and the company’s job posting index. Throughout sectors, Ullrich calls this a “low-hire, low-fire” environment where layoffs aren’t ticking up to especially concerning levels, but where companies aren’t creating many new jobs either.
This is bad news for those who do lose their jobs, for whom it will likely take longer to land a job than it would have a couple years ago — in 2023, for example, Indeed’s index found retail hiring to be 14 percentage points above pre-Covid levels.
Ullrich attributes most of the sluggish hiring to economic uncertainty. “We have uncertainty about everything from tariff policy to Federal Reserve interest-rate policy to … the longest government shutdown in history,” Ullrich said. “It just slows down decision-making.”
Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, made a similar judgment. “It has been very difficult for businesses to plan for hiring and investment when they just haven’t been sure how the economy is going to evolve over the coming months or how policy might change,” Zhao said. “It’s just very, very difficult to commit to hiring more people when you don’t know if the economy is going to slow down further.”
Zhao said hiring rates are comparable to those in the early 2010s and are low given the current level of unemployment. Unemployment rates have soared to a four-year high as of August, according to Reuters.
“For workers who are laid off, or for workers who are trying to find their first job out of school, it’s very difficult to get onto the career ladder at all,” Zhao said.
Zhao said laid-off retail workers should consider other industries where they could bring their skills to broaden their options. “If you’re a successful marketing manager in retail, there’s no reason that you can’t take those skills to another sector,” he said.
Ted Chalupsky, founder and CEO of Minnesota-based hiring firm The Right Staff, agreed. He said workers should take inventory of any skills that would carry over to other industries, from communication and sales skills to hard skills and software expertise.
“The biggest need we’re seeing right now is for sales-related skills, accounting-related skills and certainly certain technology-related skills,” like cybersecurity skills, Chalupsky said, adding that even soft skills can be applicable to emerging opportunities in artificial intelligence.
“If a person has good communication skills and just some basic technology skills, that could be very transferable to some of the AI needs that are popping up right now,” Chalupsky said. “Interpersonal communication skills have always been sort of an issue that clients have come back to us and said, ‘Boy, we really like their hard skills, but if they could communicate better, we’d really like to bring them on board.’”
Chalupsky, who places employees in roles from accounting to IT to sales, said his clients across sectors expect to open up more jobs in the first quarter of 2026.
“A lot of people say, when we get into holiday season, it’s not a good time to be doing a job search,” Chalupsky said. “And my response to that is, ‘No, you’re wrong,’ because these people want to get these positions filled in the first quarter. The sooner you get in front of the hiring managers, the sooner you’re going to find a job.”
Some Amazon and Target employees are not only facing a difficult job market, but they’re also facing the job market for the first time in years, if not decades.
“I’m terrified,” one laid-off Target employee who had been with the company for close to a decade told Modern Retail on the condition of anonymity. “I haven’t been unemployed since I was 16, so this is completely new territory for me. But I’m determined to find a new role in a corporate setting and redefine my career path. It’s overwhelming, but I’m trying to channel that energy into moving forward and presenting my best self.”
Zhao said workers who last searched for a job even a few years ago should reset their expectations for what the job search process will look like; it will take longer and require candidates to submit more applications.
“It is important to make sure that you have the support system you need and that you are taking the job search at a sustainable pace,” Zhao said. “It’s not going to be easy to find a job over the course of a week or two; it is going to take some time, and it is going to take sustained effort beyond that.”
Paul DeBettignies, founder of Minneapolis-based Launch Hiring, said he’s been telling Target workers to get started on applying now, even if they’re still getting paid until the new year. He said that, while he would usually recommend people take some time for their mental health and to process their emotions, he doesn’t think there’s time if people want offers anytime soon.
“Do not sit on your ass right now,” DeBettignies said. “There’s a normal mourning period for this; you cannot afford to do it right now.”