Hire Calling

Breaking Job News: Workers Lose Trust in Leadership & Holiday Jobs Disappear

• Pete Newsome

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The U.S. job market is caught in a strange paradox.

Confidence is waning, small-business profits are shrinking, and holiday hiring has reached its weakest point in more than a decade. Yet millions of qualified candidates still can’t land jobs. In today’s Breaking Job News, host Pete Newsome discusses what’s really happening behind the numbers: an economy where leaders are losing trust, workers are losing patience, and the hiring process itself is breaking down.

From NFIB’s cooling Small Business Optimism Index to Glassdoor’s 2026 Worklife Trends Report revealing “forever layoffs” and collapsing faith in leadership, Pete connects the dots between market signals and daily workplace reality. You’ll learn how slow hiring cycles, outdated job requirements, and underpriced offers are turning a manageable slowdown into a confidence crisis, and what innovative leaders are doing differently to build trust, speed up hiring, and keep talent engaged.

He’ll also break down the leanest holiday job market since 2012 and what it means for candidates entering 2026, plus where early-career wages are finally catching up.

News Articles:
1. Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026: https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/
2. Job Seekers Stare Down a Gloomy Holiday Hiring Season: https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/holiday-seasonal-jobs-market-61f071b5?mod=jobs_news_article_pos1
3. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)'s October Report: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.nfib.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/NFIB-SBET-Report-Oct.-2025.pdf

💬 What do you think: What’s one thing leadership could do tomorrow to rebuild credibility? 

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👋 FOLLOW PETE NEWSOME ONLINE:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewsome/
Blog Articles: https://www.4cornerresources.com/blog

Pete Newsome:

Today's job market headlines include Glassdoor's work-life trends for 2026, a gloomy take on holiday hiring, and President Trump's interesting comments on American talent. But leading off, small business owners are staying cautious as profits shrink and hiring plans cool. The optimism that fueled last year's growth has started to fade. Here's what the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index tells us. Optimism came in at 98.2 in October, which is a 0.6 drop from September. We're heading in the wrong direction. 32% of the owners surveyed reported job openings they couldn't fill, which is unchanged from last month. 15% plan to create jobs over the next three months, which is down a point, and 49% reported few or no qualified applicants for their openings.

Pete Newsome:

Labor quality rose to the top business problem at 27%. I see this survey every month and I just don't get it. The entire time I've been monitoring this data, it consistently shows that business owners, specifically small business owners, are claiming to have jobs they can't fill to a significant degree. 49% reported that they're not receiving qualified applicants. It just doesn't align with what I know is happening in the job market, with what I know at a very intimate level of who is looking for jobs right now and their inability to find them. So there's a huge disconnect. And the only thing I can conclude is that if you're one of those NFIB members taking this survey and claiming you can't find talent or struggling with the quality of what you uh the people you are finding on the job market, you're doing something very wrong. So call me. I'll refer you to the right staffing company if it's not going to be mine, and that problem can be solved very quickly, I assure you.

Pete Newsome:

Next up, the trust gap between employees and leadership is widening, and the data shows it's not just a vibe, it's measurable. Glassdoor just released their work-life trends for 2026. Let's go through them one at a time. Trend one, the employee leader disconnect. Glassdoor found ratings of senior leadership remain well below pandemic highs. Mentions of disconnect in reviews are up 24%, miscommunication is up 25%, distrust up 26%, and misalignment skyrocketed 149% year over year. The steepest declines appear in consulting, media, technology, and other industries that are historically seen as innovation leaders. So not good right now at all with what's happening there. And I think it's just indicative of a stale labor market. Things aren't moving.

Pete Newsome:

And with that, a lot of employees are staying at their jobs. We know that. That's also been a trend. And as such, I think there's just a lot of dissatisfaction because if employees can't move, a lot of them are feeling stuck where they are, and that's not good for anyone. Trend two, the forever layoff sets in. Small layoffs under 50 now make up more than half of all warrings, and that is a federal requirement that employers announce layoffs in advance. And that's up 38% from a decade ago. And these rolling cuts, they don't grab headlines, they don't get a lot of attention, but what they do is create lasting anxiety and severe damage to employee morale. Mentions of layoffs and job insecurity and reviews are higher than they were at the height of 2020's cuts. So again, just bad sentiment right now among a lot of workers. Trend three is the slow-mo RTO will continue.

Pete Newsome:

Career opportunity ratings for remote and hybrid workers fell from 4.1% in 2020 to 3.5 in 2025. And so while work-from-home rates have stayed about the same, the workers who are remote feel left behind in recognition and advancement. That makes sense, out of sight, out of mind. So if you're an employee, maybe take some of that ownership on yourself and make sure that you're present, make sure that you're saying you have to toot your own horn. I would recommend doing that anyway if you're in corporate America. But for employers, it's incumbent upon you. If you're going to have a remote workforce, if you've made that decision, you can't leave those employees lagging.

Pete Newsome:

You have to make sure that you're recognizing them for the work they do and seeking it out. It is not as easy, but that's just the deal. Remote work has changed a lot of how we need to operate, and you have to keep up with that. Trend four, AI isn't bringing employees down yet. So jobs like translators, software engineers, and copywriters have showed big drops, although I did see some data last week indicating that copywriting hiring, I think this was an upwork report, is back on the rise. So as companies realize AI's limitations, they're going to make adjustments. I think that pendulum is swinging back in the employees' favor, at least for now. Um, but at the same time, AI is becoming more prevalent. Companies are increasing their investments.

Pete Newsome:

They are looking to do more with less as a result of AI and create efficiencies and yes, potentially replace jobs. So it hasn't really kicked in yet. I'm not so confident that that will last. I think as 2026 unfolds, we're going to see a lot more jobs lost to AI. I just do. I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong, but that's the trend that I'm personally seeing from what I touch and have exposure to every day. Trend five, job seekers will take what they can get. Candidates are accepting jobs that they once uh would have passed on due to market conditions. That's happening. We know that pendulum swings being what they are, they're in favor of the employer right now. I think once we see some stability in the market, that will swing back the other way.

Pete Newsome:

I believe that, but it hasn't happened yet. Let's hope that the um the federal government stops moving the goal line on us constantly. But again, acceptance rates um are roughly through for roughly three out of four offers were reported on Glassdoor. So I still find that data surprising every time I see Glassdoor report it. It tells me that there's bias in their reporting because if only three out of four job offers are being accepted, if if that's just way too low, I don't see that ever happening in the job market normally. So my working theory is that what happens is employees will go uh on the site uh and talk about why they didn't accept the job offer, but the ones who do, they just go to work, right? They just start working. They're not thinking of going on Glassdoor and giving a positive review.

Pete Newsome:

So I think that's why the numbers are a lot skewed always from a review site, general statement. Um, but then the final trend is better pay for the new grads who can land a job. Real wages for early career workers are projected to surpass 2020 purchasing power in 2026 after years of lagging behind inflation. Jobs for new grads are few and far between. That's the problem. But the ones that are getting offers seem to be getting uh paid at the right rate now. And I have seen data independent of Glassdoor indicating the same. So some good news, generally bad for um for recent grads.

Pete Newsome:

We know that the market's just super tight. And um that I don't see changing anytime soon, unfortunately. But it's good to see that the ones who are getting offers are getting paid at the right rate. So there we have it. Glassdoors 2026 work life trends report, and some good, mostly not great, as we head into the new year. Next, this year's holiday hiring season is shaping up to be the leanest in more than a decade. The Wall Street Journal reports that retailers and logistics firms are pulling back sharply on seasonal hiring. Large employers announced just under 373,000 seasonal job openings through October, which is down from 660,000 last year. So that is a giant drop.

Pete Newsome:

And it's the fewest since uh 2012 that have been announced. On indeed, job searches for holiday work are 27% higher than they were a year ago, but postings are 15% lower. So not a good sign there. More people looking for seasonal work, fewer companies hiring. Major companies like UPS, Target, and Macy's haven't released their usual hiring targets after cutting full-time staff earlier this year. Also, not good to see. This year's results show employers holding the line as they wait for signals of stronger demand. So that is such a recurring theme, the hurry up and wait that companies are going through right now.

Pete Newsome:

And I believe that everyone just wants stability. We need that stability from the top, from the federal government. Stop moving the goal line on us, stop doing crazy things with all the infighting, and I expect what we that we will see hiring start to pick up again. Now, before we close, President Trump made some really interesting comments in an interview with Laura Ingram. She was asking about his intentions with the H1B visa program. And she started off by saying, if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with hundreds of thousands of workers from the outside. And he said, I agree, but you have to bring in talent. And her response to that was, we have plenty of talented people here. And his immediate response without hesitation was, no, you don't.

Pete Newsome:

You don't have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can't take people off an unemployment line and say, I'm going to put you into a factory where we're going to make missiles. You have to teach them. Okay, there's so much in this. I understand what Trump's point was, and I agree that we do need to bring in the best talent from around the world where it is lacking in the US. But we also know that the H1V visa program has been abused to a significant degree. There are many H1 uh visa holders over here who aren't supplying talent that we don't already have or providing talent we don't already have. Far from it. And so that needs to stop first. And I believe that Laura's point is that we should be teaching our young people to fill the jobs that are needed, right?

Pete Newsome:

Not just young people, but displaced workers as well. We should be aligning that with the needs that actually actually exist in our in our market. And we're not doing that. Our current education system doesn't allow for that at all. We are encouraging everyone to go to college, having them earn degrees that there's just no demand for in the market. Most of the jobs that are open right now don't require college degrees. That's a fact. Most college degrees right now don't qualify the uh person who earned it to do anything in the professional world, right? So, look, my my last comment there is President Trump's gonna have to be accountable to what he said. He upset a lot of people with it, rightfully so. Um, but I also think we should hold colleges more accountable to their graduate success.

Pete Newsome:

If you're gonna take someone's money and give them a degree, have them earn a degree under the expectation there will be a job on the other side of it, and there's no job because there's no demand for the the what that person holds as a degree, well it seems like we should hold those organizations accountable. And we just don't today. We just continue to promote this cycle of going to college with no real plan, no idea of what's really going to be on the other side of it. It's broken, it needs to be fixed. But I'll get off that soapbox for now and wrap up with today's fun fact. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established the 40-hour work week and the first national minimum wage. It's not really that fun.

Pete Newsome:

It is interesting. So uh it was Wild West before that. You could argue that it's still in many cases wild west today, but that 40-hour week standard was established. I know a lot of people argue that's too many hours. I see a lot of tech companies right now saying it's not nearly enough. So federal government weighing in, established a baseline, and there we have it. And obviously, we've seen a lot of changes to minimum wage since then, and now at the state level, that continues to um vary greatly depending on where you live. So there we are. A lot of rambling from me today, but thank you for listening. If you've stuck this far, please like, subscribe, share with anyone you think might be interested, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.