Of the 12.1 million workers who experienced unemployment in 2024, 21.5% searched for work for 27 weeks or more, up from the prior year. That's 2.6 million people spending half a year or longer trying to find work. Meanwhile, the work-experience unemployment rate (people who experienced any unemployment during the year) increased to 8.3%, up 0.4 percentage points from 2023.
The labor market is loosening, but not evenly. The number of people who experienced unemployment rose by 978,000 year-over-year to 14.7 million total. But within that group, the composition is shifting: more people are experiencing longer searches, and 2.6 million looked for work but didn't work at all during 2024.
Here's the breakdown by demographics: Black workers had the highest work-experience unemployment rate at 11.7% (up from prior year), followed by Hispanic workers at 9.8% (unchanged), White workers at 7.6% (up), and Asian workers at 6.7% (unchanged). Men experienced higher unemployment rates than women across most groups (8.7% vs 7.8% overall).
Why it matters for you:
- Talent pool composition is changing: When 1 in 5 unemployed workers has been searching for 27+ weeks, you're increasingly interviewing people with extended gaps. That doesn't mean they're lower quality—it means the market is taking longer to clear.
- Resume gap bias costs you: If you're screening out candidates with 6+ month gaps, you're eliminating 21.5% of the available talent pool. In a tight market, that's expensive. The question isn't "why the gap"—it's "can they do the job."
- Long searches signal market friction, not candidate quality: When search duration increases year-over-year, it indicates structural matching problems (location, skills, credential inflation), not that workers got worse. Your competitors are passing on good people because of outdated screening rules.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Work Experience of the Population (2024)
Watch this: Companies still using "currently employed" as a quality signal are systematically excluding 8.3% of the workforce who experienced unemployment in 2024—many of whom are excellent workers caught in a slower-clearing market. Extended search times don't predict performance. They predict that other companies are using the same lazy heuristics you are.
The contrarian play: Actively recruit from the 27+ week search cohort. These workers are motivated, have been vetted by multiple interview processes (and rejected for reasons often unrelated to capability), and are less likely to have competing offers. While your competitors screen them out, you get access to talent they're ignoring—at lower salary expectations and higher acceptance rates.