The first jobs report of the second Donald Trump administration comes out Friday. So far, we know that weekly jobless claims dropped last week, according to data from the Labor Department, and the number of people continuing to file for unemployment benefits reached nearly a three-year high — showing it’s taking workers longer to find new jobs.

Evidence of a competitive job market also showed up in the latest Beige Book, a report the Federal Reserve puts out eight times a year with anecdotal business conditions gathered from each Fed district. Many businesses, outside chronically short-staffed sectors like health care and construction, reported an easy time finding qualified workers. One said they had “resumes stacked to the ceiling,” while another said jobs that used to get dozens of applications now attract hundreds.

On paper, the job market looks pretty strong this year — layoffs and unemployment have been relatively low. But not so much from the vantage point of career coach Amanda Augustine, who works at outplacement firm Careerminds.

“For those who are looking for a job, you know, get ready to be in it for the long haul,” she said.

Augustine serves mostly white-collar workers who’ve been let go. She said it’s taking an average of 5½ months for them to find new jobs. “It does seem to be a longer, more drawn out process than before,” she said.

Competition is fierce, she said, and many employers are asking applicants to jump through more hoops, such as skill assessments, personality tests or multiple rounds of interviews.

“Nobody wants to make a costly mistake and hire the wrong person, so they’re taking all this extra time,” Augustine said.

The job market in some sectors almost feels frozen, and not just because hiring has slowed, said Allison Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed Hiring Lab.

“People are pretty hesitant to leave their jobs — quit rates are pretty low right now, so it seems as though people don’t have the confidence that they did, you know, a few years ago, to just go out and find a new job,” she said.

Shrivastava said in some fields, like accounting, job postings are well above their pre-pandemic baseline. But they’re down in banking and software development.

Unemployment has had the biggest impact on workers with some college education but no advanced degree, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at job site ZipRecruiter. 

“There are some fields where workers are still doing fine. But for people with communications majors, [public relations, tech, human resources], all of those kinds of fields, this is a very, very unforgiving market right now,” she said.

ZipRecruiter surveys of confidence among job seekers show a decline this year, Pollak added. “And workers are expressing a fair degree of layoff anxiety.”

Especially government workers, who are job searching at higher rates. Pollak said federal employees are concentrated in fields like program management and administration, so those areas are being flooded with applications.