The job market is frozen in place, and it may still be a while until it thaws, said Nicholas Bloom, the Stanford economist whose research explained why millions left their jobs during the Great Resignation.
His advice for people with a job right now? “don’t leave it,” Bloom said during a webinar at the Harvard Kennedy School last week titled “The Economic Consequences of the Iran War.”
Yet, employees who may not be satisfied with their job for any reason such as their location or problems with their manager should be extra cautious about leaving, Bloom added in the email.
“Folks that want to change jobs should line one up before quitting their current role. You don’t want to quit a job to find that what you thought would be easy – getting another job – turns out to be a massive struggle,” he wrote.
“This jobs market slowdown is driven in large part by rising economic and policy uncertainty, with policies against trade, immigration and wars making conditions unpredictable,” he wrote in the email to Fortune. “This uncertainty leads business to slow hiring.”
For workers already struggling to find new jobs in a frozen labor market, the prospect of higher borrowing costs on top of geopolitical uncertainty could not have come at a worse time, as it directly affects businesses who already don’t want to make a costly mistake in overhiring.
