Job seekers encounter a ‘brutal and frustrating’ hiring market in e-commerce

“I’ve got a network, and I’m extremely active – and I would still not assume that I’m going to find something fast,” he said in an interview as he was beginning his job search. He has over 10 years of experience in marketing, having worked with a number of e-commerce brands both on the agency side and in-house. 

Now, he spends four or five hours a day networking or scrolling through job boards. And now, he’s starting to experiencing some of the things others have been venting about on LinkedIn for months: An automatic rejection email, sent at 12:50 a.m; A job posted on Workday seemingly just as a formality, only for the company to promote someone internally; A job that remains open for months on end, leading Nate to wonder: was the company ever really hiring for this role in the first place?

“I understand where people are coming from, when they say it feels like they’re putting stuff into a black hole,” Nate said. 

None of these experiences are unique to e-commerce. The U.S. is undergoing what several journalists and economists have called a “white-collar recession,” as corporations course-correct from the overhiring they did during Covid. While there’s little data on how many layoffs took place in the e-commerce industry specifically, the layoffs tracker Layoff.AI estimates that 130,482 people have been laid off by tech companies in 2024. That’s on top of the more than 260,000 workers laid off by tech companies last year – which includes the waves of layoffs executed by e-commerce giants like Amazon. 

Vanguard estimates that the hiring rate for people making more than $96,000 a year is the worst it’s been since 2014, excluding 2020. “If you make a six-figure salary, it really is a bad time to be looking for a job,” Aki Ito, chief correspondent at Business Insider wrote.

“This is the most brutal and frustrating market I’ve been through,” said Liam, also not his real name. In total, Modern Retail spoke with 10 people in the industry, most of whom are actively looking for jobs, and a few who recently got hired. Most were granted anonymity, and have had their names changed, in order to more freely discuss a sensitive topic.

Read the full story on Modern Retail.