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When Jonathan Clanton was laid off earlier this year, he did what most people do: he started searching. Within days, he was spending hours scrolling job listings, refreshing feeds, and applying frantically. "It felt like a mix of social media addiction plus the anxiety of needing to find work," he says.
There's now a name for this. "Doomjobbing" — a mashup of doomscrolling and job hunting — is what happens when job-search stress tips into compulsion. The term was coined, fittingly, by an eight-year-old: the daughter of Ilya Bagrak, a product manager laid off in March, who noticed her dad was always in the LinkedIn app.
The behavior makes a certain kind of sense. The market is brutal right now. The average job posting received 242 applications in mid-2025 — three times the 2017 average. One in four unemployed workers has been searching for over six months. When competition is that fierce, it feels logical to apply everywhere, constantly, before your resume gets buried.
But that logic is mostly an illusion. Career coach Eliana Goldstein puts it plainly: applying to more jobs doesn't improve your odds if the jobs aren't a good fit. What it does do is generate more rejections, more silence, and a creeping sense that something is wrong with you. "It's going to make you doubt yourself," she says.
Career coach Phoebe Gavin sees the same pattern. Scrolling feels productive, she says, but it leaves people feeling "even more powerless, even more hopeless." It's a control response — because so much of the job search is out of your hands, you reach for the thing you can do, even when it doesn't help.
Clanton noticed it was bleeding into his family life. Mid-conversation with his kids, he'd drift to his phone. That was the moment he decided to change.
Three ways out
Focus before you search. Goldstein's first rule: know what you want before you open a single job board. The "spray and pray" approach wastes time on roles you won't get and dilutes the applications you might. Configure your filters, narrow your target, and treat each application as worth doing properly.
Block your time. Clanton now dedicates fixed daily windows to three things — applying, networking, and building his LinkedIn presence — and closes the apps outside of those windows. Gavin recommends going further: designate specific times and places where job alerts are simply off-limits. In bed. At dinner. The search doesn't have to colonize your whole life.
Work your network. This is where searches actually end. Gavin's observation is blunt: candidates who come in through relationships have significantly faster searches than those who apply cold. A warm referral doesn't just help — it "exponentially increases" your chances of hearing back, according to Goldstein. Every hour spent scrolling is an hour not spent on a conversation that might actually matter.
The job market is hard. Doomjobbing makes it harder.