A new Fed analysis shows a surprising shift in who's struggling to find work

Almost always employed workers are seeing their job finding rates fall. damircudic/Getty Images Workers who are usually employed have seen their job-finding rates fall sharply.

AI-exposed roles have seen the biggest drop in job-finding rates, reshaping the current job market.

Despite growth in some sectors, overall US job losses in July indicate ongoing labor challenges.

It used to be that if you're the type of person who always has a job , you're the type of person who can always find a job.

But a new analysis of job-finding rates complicates that picture.

The study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond examines three types of workers and how they've fared in their job search .

"Primary workers," who make up about 55% of the US labor pool, are "almost always employed," per the analysis.

They have steady work histories and usually only show up in unemployment statistics when something has gone wrong.

Historically, primary workers had the best odds of finding a new job .

But their job-finding rates have fallen 13 percentage points from a November 2022 high to a September 2025 low — the biggest drop for any group the analysis covered.

Secondary workers, who make up about 14% of the labor pool, are often out of work or cycling through different jobs.

They often make up the bulk of measured unemployment, and have a historically lower job-finding rate.

While those workers still have a harder time finding jobs than their more attached peers, they haven't seen their fortunes fall as much; in the same period of November 2022 to September 2025, the job-finding rate for secondary workers fell just two percentage points.

This is new.