Why read this: This feature opens a door onto a labour market your students are about to enter. It uses two real jobseekers, three industry experts, and macro data from the US, UK, and Canada to ask a question students rarely see posed in textbooks: when finding work becomes hard, who profits from the difficulty? Reading at C1 lets the class engage with feature journalism on its own terms, tracking five distinct voices, weighing competing claims about AI and the labour market, and noticing how a writer can present a debate without ever settling it.
What to notice: Three things repay close attention. First, the multi-voice structure: Ventola and Duncan are jobseekers paying for tools, while D'Onofrio, Gable, and Groom are industry insiders, and the writer lets their views collide rather than reconcile them. Second, the dense Tier 3 vocabulary clustered around the labour market itself, including candidate market, employer-driven market, premium subscriber, hiring managers, and burnout candidates, which carries the article's argument as much as the statistics do. Third, the closing hedge from Ventola: 'if I measure them strictly in dollars'. That single qualifier reframes everything she has said about her $6,000 outlay, and students who read literally will miss the rhetorical move entirely.
Skills practised: Tracking who-said-what across a quote-driven feature; distinguishing macro evidence (national unemployment data) from micro evidence (one person's spending); reading hedged claims, particularly modal and adverbial qualifiers such as 'strictly', 'roughly', and 'less likely to be replaced'; weighing competing expert opinions without reducing them to a single answer; and recognising the conventions of business journalism, which presents a debate, supplies the evidence, and leaves the verdict to the reader.
How job hunting became an expensive business
With work hard to come by on both sides of the Atlantic, applicants are pouring money into premium subscriptions, AI tools, and career coaches, raising an awkward question: does any of it actually pay off?
Tap any green word in the article to see its meaning.
Giovanna Ventola, 35, of North Carolina, reckons she has spent close to $6,000 on . Software for polishing her resume, interview-training courses, , to job-search platforms: each line item felt like a sensible investment in a market where applicants are increasingly paid tools to . “I was doing more than just submitting applications,” explains Ventola, who has been chasing roles in . With jobs , she is one of a growing cohort of jobseekers learning that to now carries a real price tag.
Recruiters trace the trend to a sluggish labour market. In the United States, the average unemployed worker now needs roughly six months to land a new role, up from five last year. Canada shed 66,000 jobs in a single August, lifting its unemployment rate to 7.1%. British job vacancies fell by another 9,000, or 1.3%, in the three months to September, the thirty-ninth consecutive quarterly decline. The is visible on the platforms themselves: LinkedIn told the BBC that its base has grown almost 50% in two years, and roughly 40% of those subscribers now lean on to refine their profiles.
Across the Atlantic, Kaycia Duncan, 30, has spent more than a year hunting for marketing work from her home in Buckinghamshire. She finds the silence disheartening, evidence of how punishing the market has become. Like Ventola, she invests roughly £30 a month in tools she hopes will sharpen her : a premium service that lets her message directly, plus a graphic-design subscription for producing polished CVs and . While she waits, she has taken on and launched a YouTube channel chronicling her search. Two hundred applications in, she still believes the spending was justified.
With interviews , Ventola took to TikTok last year, partly to externalise her own troubleshooting and partly because she suspected, correctly, that she was not alone. Her clips quickly began to hundreds of comments from other jobseekers in the same bind. That response for Rhize, the community she founded so job hunters could swap notes on which paid tools actually deliver. Membership has climbed past 4,000, roughly 80% in the US.
Industry observers read these stories as symptoms of a deeper rebalancing. “We have seen the shift from a in the past three years, to more of an ,” says Nancy D'Onofrio, a Toronto-based director at Randstad, the multinational HR and . “There are far less opportunities and far more available talent, so it's a really .” D'Onofrio advances in AI as a key driver, an analysis echoed by Nicole Gable of LHH North America, who attributes the volatility to “the ”. Few employers, Gable adds, can confidently name the skills they will need five years out.
The uncertainty has been good for . Miriam Groom, who runs a practice in Canada, says her client roster has expanded exponentially. Once dominated by , her caseload now splits roughly 50/50 between the burnt-out and those displaced by layoffs. She is also seeing clients trying to retrain for roles less likely to be replaced by technology, mapping current skills against jobs expected to be for the next two decades. Sometimes, she says, the kindest advice is to abandon a target role and steer toward a different sector with stronger demand.
D'Onofrio doubts that paid tools are the answer. Her advice is unflashy: contact directly, attend , and use the free resume-strengthening utilities already online. She also urges candidates to when approached by career coaches or self-styled CV experts, and to investigate anyone thoroughly before handing over money. Ventola herself ends on a similar hedge. “Honestly, I don't think any of my investments were worth it if I measure them strictly in dollars,” she admits. “But what they did do was open my eyes to , and push me to .”
Giovanna Ventola, 35, of North Carolina, reckons she has spent close to $6,000 on . Software for polishing her resume, interview-training courses, , to job-search platforms: each line item felt like a sensible investment in a market where applicants are increasingly paid tools to . “I was doing more than just submitting applications,” explains Ventola, who has been chasing roles in . With jobs , she is one of a growing cohort of jobseekers learning that to now carries a real price tag.
Recruiters trace the trend to a sluggish labour market. In the United States, the average unemployed worker now needs roughly six months to land a new role, up from five last year. Canada shed 66,000 jobs in a single August, lifting its unemployment rate to 7.1%. British job vacancies fell by another 9,000, or 1.3%, in the three months to September, the thirty-ninth consecutive quarterly decline. The is visible on the platforms themselves: LinkedIn told the BBC that its base has grown almost 50% in two years, and roughly 40% of those subscribers now lean on to refine their profiles.
Across the Atlantic, Kaycia Duncan, 30, has spent more than a year hunting for marketing work from her home in Buckinghamshire. She finds the silence disheartening, evidence of how punishing the market has become. Like Ventola, she invests roughly £30 a month in tools she hopes will sharpen her : a premium service that lets her message directly, plus a graphic-design subscription for producing polished CVs and . While she waits, she has taken on and launched a YouTube channel chronicling her search. Two hundred applications in, she still believes the spending was justified.
With interviews , Ventola took to TikTok last year, partly to externalise her own troubleshooting and partly because she suspected, correctly, that she was not alone. Her clips quickly began to hundreds of comments from other jobseekers in the same bind. That response for Rhize, the community she founded so job hunters could swap notes on which paid tools actually deliver. Membership has climbed past 4,000, roughly 80% in the US.
Industry observers read these stories as symptoms of a deeper rebalancing. “We have seen the shift from a in the past three years, to more of an ,” says Nancy D'Onofrio, a Toronto-based director at Randstad, the multinational HR and . “There are far less opportunities and far more available talent, so it's a really .” D'Onofrio advances in AI as a key driver, an analysis echoed by Nicole Gable of LHH North America, who attributes the volatility to “the ”. Few employers, Gable adds, can confidently name the skills they will need five years out.
The uncertainty has been good for . Miriam Groom, who runs a practice in Canada, says her client roster has expanded exponentially. Once dominated by , her caseload now splits roughly 50/50 between the burnt-out and those displaced by layoffs. She is also seeing clients trying to retrain for roles less likely to be replaced by technology, mapping current skills against jobs expected to be for the next two decades. Sometimes, she says, the kindest advice is to abandon a target role and steer toward a different sector with stronger demand.
D'Onofrio doubts that paid tools are the answer. Her advice is unflashy: contact directly, attend , and use the free resume-strengthening utilities already online. She also urges candidates to when approached by career coaches or self-styled CV experts, and to investigate anyone thoroughly before handing over money. Ventola herself ends on a similar hedge. “Honestly, I don't think any of my investments were worth it if I measure them strictly in dollars,” she admits. “But what they did do was open my eyes to , and push me to .”
Questions
Check your understanding
- 01
Ventola closes the article by saying her investments were not worth it 'if I measure them strictly in dollars'. What does the qualifier 'strictly in dollars' most likely imply?
- 02
Which combination of evidence from the article most directly supports D'Onofrio's claim that the market has shifted from a candidate market to an employer-driven one?
- 03
Why does the article place D'Onofrio's advice that 'candidates need not spend money' alongside the stories of Ventola and Duncan?
- 04
Argue whether the spending described in this article is best understood as a rational investment by jobseekers or as a symptom of a market that exploits anxious applicants. Use at least three pieces of evidence from the article in your answer.
Suggested length: ~100 words
- 05
Assess the claim that artificial intelligence is the central reason job hunting has become more difficult. How well does the article support this claim, and what alternative explanations does it imply?
Suggested length: ~100 words
Questions
Check your understanding
- 01
Ventola closes the article by saying her investments were not worth it 'if I measure them strictly in dollars'. What does the qualifier 'strictly in dollars' most likely imply?
- 02
Which combination of evidence from the article most directly supports D'Onofrio's claim that the market has shifted from a candidate market to an employer-driven one?
- 03
Why does the article place D'Onofrio's advice that 'candidates need not spend money' alongside the stories of Ventola and Duncan?
- 04
Argue whether the spending described in this article is best understood as a rational investment by jobseekers or as a symptom of a market that exploits anxious applicants. Use at least three pieces of evidence from the article in your answer.
Suggested length: ~100 words
- 05
Assess the claim that artificial intelligence is the central reason job hunting has become more difficult. How well does the article support this claim, and what alternative explanations does it imply?
Suggested length: ~100 words