Some job seekers are "doomjobbing" as a way to cope with the stress of unemployment.
After Jonathan Clanton was laid off from his talent acquisition job earlier this year, he immediately began searching for a new role. Clanton, 39, soon found himself spending hours each day scrolling through job listings.
"It felt like a mix of social media addiction plus the anxiety of needing to find work," he tells CNBC Make It.
Now there's a word for that behavior: "doomjobbing," a combination of doomscrolling and job searching. Driven by the stress of looking for work, some job seekers find themselves constantly refreshing job sites and frantically applying to new roles.
Ilya Bagrak, a product manager based in Los Gatos, California, posted about the term in a March 25 Threads post: "I got laid off two weeks ago," Bagrak wrote. "My 8 yo daughter saw me spending a lot of time in the LinkedIn app, and she called it 'doomjobbing.'" Bagrak, 45, tells CNBC Make It that losing his job created "a lot of uncertainty." As the primary breadwinner for his family, which includes his wife and two young children, Bagrak says his immediate concerns were about affording healthcare and paying the mortgage.
That stress led him to spend more and more time searching for and applying to jobs online.
Scrolling through job posts may temporarily scratch an emotional itch, says career and leadership coach Phoebe Gavin, but in her experience, it ultimately makes job seekers feel "even more powerless, even more hopeless about when or how their job search is ever going to end." Job search anxiety has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, according to career coach Eliana Goldstein.
"The job market feels harder than it's ever been," she says, "and people are feeling so much pressure." Many candidates are finding that conventional job search tactics aren't moving the needle, Goldstein says: "We have traditionally always been taught that if you need to find a job, you go on job sites," but each new job listing receives a flood of applications "right away." The average job opening in mid-2025 received 242 applications, three times the average in 2017, according to Greenhouse data reported by Business Insider. Long-term unemployment is also on the rise: 1 in 4 unemployed workers have been job searching for over half a year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Given the level of competition for each new job, many job seekers feel that they need to apply to as many roles as possible, as quickly as possible, in order to have a chance at landing an interview, Goldstein says. According to a survey conducted in March by the job site Monster, 48% of job seekers say that they frequently or regularly prioritize speed and volume over selectivity in the job search, and 25% now apply to any job that seems remotely obtainable.
Clanton says he felt pressure to be among the first to apply to new job postings so that his resume wouldn't get "lost in the shuffle," which drove him to spend even more time on job sites. "It's impossible to keep up with it," he says.
Bagrak feels similarly. "The job market is so tight right now that time matters a lot," he says. "You're incentivized to always check your searches, check your feeds" for new roles.
In Gavin's experience, "doomjobbing" and other similar behaviors stem from a desire for stability: "Because so many aspects of the job search are outside of our control, we look for things that can help us feel like we are claiming some control — even if it's not particularly effective." "Doomjobbing" may make job seekers feel like they're being productive, but it's not a practical way to conduct a job search, Goldstein says.
Applying to a larger volume of jobs doesn't necessarily increase your odds of success, she says, and indiscriminately applying to roles that may not be a good fit means that you're likely to receive more rejections or fewer responses.
"It's going to make you feel anxious. It's going to make you doubt yourself: 'Am I a bad candidate? What do people not like about me?'" Goldstein says.
In her view, behaviors like "doomjobbing" take candidates' time and energy away from "doing more purposeful work like relationship building, developing your network, [and] thinking about your personal brand and how you can better stand out," she says.
It can also have a negative impact on your personal life, according to Goldstein, which is something that Clanton experienced firsthand. He says he realized that his habit of scrolling through job listings was preventing him from being present with his three children.
"There were times where I'm sitting there talking to them and we're having fun, and all of a sudden, Daddy opens up his phone and is zoned out," he recalls.
After that, Clanton says he resolved to change his approach to job searching "before it really impacted the rest of my life or the people around me." Bagrak says he had to "find a more productive way" of coping with job search stress. Here are three steps job seekers can take to deal with "doomjobbing." Goldstein's No. 1 tip for job seekers is to keep your search focused. "Before you ever approach any job board, you need to get extremely clear on what it is that you want to do, what is the role that is best for you," Goldstein says.
Given how competitive the job market is, it's a waste of time to apply to roles that aren't a good fit, she says: "You cannot make yourself a chameleon and be applicable to every single job out there." Rather than defaulting to a "spray and pray" strategy, Gavin recommends slowing down and focusing on one job application at a time.
Clanton came to a similar conclusion: Rather than rushing to apply to each new role, he says he realized it was more effective to "take time to reformat my resume and apply to jobs that really do fit my background." To avoid the temptation to mass-apply, Goldstein recommends configuring your job site filters so that you only see new roles that match your experience.
Clanton says that time blocking has helped him develop a healthier approach to his job search and cut down on "doomjobbing." Rather than scrolling on job sites at all hours, he dedicates a set amount of time each day to three specific tasks: Outside of those specific time blocks, he tries to decompress by going for a walk, catching up with friends or spending time with his family.
Setting time limits can help prevent the job search from "crowding into all the other aspects of your life," Gavin says. She also recommends creating boundaries around times and spaces where you "absolutely do not" check your job alerts: for example, when you're in bed or out to dinner.
Rather than spending all their time on applications, job seekers should prioritize making and strengthening connections, according to Gavin. In her experience, "candidates who are coming in the side door, through their relationships, are actually having much faster job searches" than people who exclusively apply on job sites, she says.
Cold outreaches are fine as one component of a broader strategy, but Goldstein recommends "proactively reaching out to people in your warm network" too. "In the end, having some type of a referral is always going to exponentially increase your chances of hearing back, of getting an opportunity," she says.
Investing time in your interpersonal relationships will always be more helpful than "just endlessly scrolling," she says.
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