DC has the highest unemployment rate in the country. No surprise, given that approximately 40,000 federal workers have been displaced due to federal downsizing.
Then there are the numbers the headlines keep leaving off. The Talent Capital platform — the region’s connected workforce hub — has more than 65,000 open jobs on it right now. Healthcare: 15,814 openings. Engineering and cybersecurity: 6,646.
Since both things are true, it raises an uncomfortable question for talent acquisition leaders.
If the talent is here, and the jobs are here, why aren’t people getting hired?
This isn’t a jobs shortage. It’s a hiring breakdown.
I’ve spent most of my 26-year career inside enterprise talent acquisition, including some of the most recognized Defense and Intel contractors in the country. I’ve built TA functions from scratch, rebuilt them after they collapsed, and quietly fixed the ones nobody wanted to admit were broken. I’ve been a job seeker during other fractured markets, and I’m an active job seeker right now. So I’m watching this from both sides of the table, and here is what I see.
Our hiring funnels are overflowing with the most qualified talent pools we’ve ever seen.
- Former federal employees with graduate degrees and security clearances most private sector recruiters don’t understand, much less value.
- Former government contractors who were so embedded in their federal programs they no longer “fit” the culture of their actual employer.
- Job seekers with decades of public service who have managed programs in environments most corporate hiring managers wouldn’t survive a quarter in.
And recruiters are screening them out.
Five things that are actually broken
After watching this play out for months, here is what I see failing:
Applicant tracking systems still optimized for the 2019 job market. Keywords that made sense when everyone was hiring the same profile from the same ten competitors do not easily translate to a GS-14 program manager or a former USAID field director. The result: match scores come back low, recruiters move on, and qualified applicants never get a human review.
Recruiters who cannot translate federal experience into private sector impact. This is not a criticism of recruiters. Most were never trained to read a federal résumé, so they pass over exceptional talent because the résumé doesn’t look like the ones they’re used to seeing.
Hiring managers chasing exact fit. The fantasy that somewhere out there is a candidate who has done this exact job at a direct competitor, is available today, and wants to work for your company at your budget. The purple squirrel recruiters hunt but never catch. Meanwhile, the candidate right in front of them who can clearly do the job gets passed over because something as simple as a job title didn’t match.
Career profiles that haven’t been reviewed and refined in years. Most companies have not updated their leveling, their competency models, or their job descriptions since before the pandemic. Then they wonder why nothing on the market seems to match what’s on the job board.
Screening on credentials instead of capability. We keep requiring five years of experience with a tool that was released three years ago. We keep asking for degrees for roles that don’t need them. We keep writing job descriptions that could only be satisfied by someone already doing the job — and then acting surprised when the pipeline is nothing but cobwebs, sorrows, and prayers.
The DC story is a national preview
Whatever you think of the federal workforce reductions, the displacement is real, the talent is real, and the hiring infrastructure we built to absorb that talent is breaking in public. DC just happens to be where the numbers are loudest right now.
What’s happening to federal workers and contractors in DC is going to happen to workers in other sectors in other cities over the next year or two. We’re already seeing AI-driven restructuring, tariff-driven layoffs, and private sector consolidation. The people losing jobs are not going to be less qualified than the people who were kept. They are going to need a hiring system that can see them. Right now, that system doesn’t exist at most companies.
What this looks like to the person on the other side
I’ve been sounding the alarm on this for a while, but I want to name it plainly, because not enough TA leaders are hearing it.
When qualified people apply to dozens of open roles and get rejected by automated systems without a single conversation, they do not conclude that the market is hard.
They conclude that the market is rigged against them.
And they’re not entirely wrong.
A former USAID official with a double major, an MBA, and 17 years of public service should not be competing against a system that cannot figure out what to do with her résumé. She should be getting interviewed. She should be getting hired. If she is not, that’s not a “her” problem. That’s an “us” problem.
If you lead a TA function, do this now
You do not need a full transformation project. You need an audit. Start with these three questions:
- Pull ten recent rejections from your ATS. How many of them would a thoughtful human have advanced? If the answer is more than three, your filter is broken.
- Ask your hiring managers to define “must have” versus “nice to have” on their three most recent job descriptions — out loud, in real time. Count the contradictions. Then fix them.
- Look at who you have hired in the last 12 months. How many of them did not fit your original profile? Those are your best signals about where your job profile is missing the mark.
If you are in the job market right now
This isn’t your fault, and you aren’t imagining what’s going wrong. But if you plan to keep job searching, you’ll have to work around a system that wasn’t built to see you clearly. That means writing résumés that translate your work into the language a private sector recruiter understands. It means building a network that can vouch for you before you upload your résumé or build a candidate profile in an ATS. It means applying with strategy, not volume.
I wrote the TRAP Job Search Guide for exactly this moment. Five steps — Assess, Prepare, Search, Apply & Connect, Interview & Follow Up. The framework I teach my clients. Built for people who are qualified and still not getting hired.
The commitment
Hiring is a commitment, not a transaction. I can’t say this enough. And I will keep saying it, because every week the DC numbers get worse, and every week I watch another wave of companies treat hiring like a transaction and then complain six months later that they cannot find talent.
The talent is available. The jobs are unfilled. What’s missing is the commitment.
If you’re a TA leader who read this and recognized your own function in it, let’s talk. I do focused consulting engagements on intake, job architecture, and recruiter enablement — the exact areas where this market is exposing the cracks. Book a call.
