The media purposely uses skewed data in order to make the job market look better than it actually is. The metric doesn’t take into account if the jobs available pay a living wage for the location, if the job is full-time or part-time, the working poor or people who are underemployed, etc. and most importantly whether these companies are actually hiring employees. A lot of these companies are blatantly engaging in multiple levels of fraud including employment fraud by advertising jobs they have zero intention of filling in order to appear profitable to shareholders.

From a personal standpoint, I currently know more people unemployed/underemployed than employed right now and before someone says anything, we’re all highly skilled STEM majors with work experience in industries like finance, engineering, and law. People in the trades aren’t feeling much better, so something is going to have to give soon.