The agony and the ecstasy of the modern job hunt

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Between the looming menace of automation and job search platforms that feel even less effective than dating apps, you’ve probably heard that trying to find work right now is brutal. And while there’s no shortage of speculation about why the labor market is so broken (see our recent episode with economist Richard D. Wolff), there’s far less (public) chatter about what the experience of searching for gainful employment in late 2025 actually looks and feels like.

Rachel Meade Smith, creator of the wildly popular weekly job search newsletter Words of Mouth, wants to change that. Her forthcoming book Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt (out April 7, 2026 via OR Books!) draws on contributions from 30 voices sourced from the WoM community to explore how job searching is actually one of the most existentially significant experiences we can have. And while the book zooms in on the more difficult emotions that can come up when we perform “search work” — her term for the unique labor associated with finding a job — it also captures how the process can be a vector for desire, inspiration, and even joy.

We discuss how the newsletter grew out of her own experiences with search work, including the strange emotional contortions that go into trying on different possible futures and having most of them vanish into the ether. We also discuss what sets this era apart from past eras of search work, the difficulties of squaring our identities and aspirations with the opportunities that are actually available to us, and how navigating the contemporary labor market means accepting that our careers may look less like ladders and more like waves.

Pre-order Search Work now exclusively through OR Books and get 15% off.

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