'Off a cliff-edge': Why analysts say the job market has weakened — and what to do about it

The outlook seems to be getting worse for job seekers.

The U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs in August, below expectations, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

Meanwhile, a data revision showed the economy lost 13,000 jobs in June — the first month of job losses since December 2020. That loss ends the consecutive-job-growth streak that had lasted 53 months, from January 2021 through May 2025, according to Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, a career site.

Outside of the pandemic, the U.S. economy hasn’t added this few jobs in the first eight months of a year since 2010, around the Great Recession, wrote Laura Ullrich, director of economic research for North America at Indeed.

“August’s Employment Report confirmed that the labour market has headed off a cliff-edge,” Bradley Saunders, a North America economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note Friday.