Americans who have jobs feel secure. That’s not the case for many who are looking for one.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laid off by streaming service Spotify last year, Joovay Arias thought he’d soon find another job as a software engineer. His previous job search in 2019 had been a piece of cake.

“Then,” he said, “I had a ton of recruiters reaching out to me — to the point where I had to turn them down.”

Arias recently found another job, but only after some unexpected experiences.

“I thought it would be about three months,” said Arias, 39. “It ended up being a year and three months.”

As Arias and other job seekers can attest, the U.S. job market, which had been red-hot for the past few years, has cooled. The labor market is now in an unusual place: most people are employed safely, and layoffs are at historic lows. But hiring has slowed and finding work has become harder. The government will report on Friday whether hiring slowed again sharply in August after much weaker-than-expected job growth in July.

“If you have a job and you’re happy with it and you want to keep it, it’s all good now,” said Nick Bunker, director of North American economic research at Indeed Hiring Lab. “But if you’re unemployed or you have a job and you want to change jobs, it’s not as rosy as it was a few years ago.”

The number of job openings has fallen by more than a third since March 2022, when the economy began to emerge from the pandemic-induced recession, according to the government’s latest monthly job vacancy and employment report.

Temporary-help firms have cut jobs in 26 of the past 28 months. That’s a telling sign: Economists typically see temporary work as a sign of where the labor market is headed, with many employers hiring temporary workers before committing to full-time hires.

In a roundup of local economic conditions this week, regional Federal Reserve banks reported signs of a slowdown in the labor market. Employment agencies said job growth slowed “as companies are more hesitant about hiring decisions,” the New York Fed said. “Job candidates are staying on the market longer.”

The Minneapolis Fed said its employment agency reported that “companies are becoming much more selective” about hiring workers. And the Atlanta Fed said that “only a handful” of companies plan to increase hiring.

Job hopping, so common two years ago, has slowed as workers have gradually lost faith that they can find better pay or working conditions elsewhere. Just 3.3 million Americans quit their jobs in July, down from a peak of 4.5 million in April 2022.

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“People don’t take jobs because they’re afraid they won’t find another one,” said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at employment website Glassdoor.

The Labor Department said in its annual revised estimate of job growth that the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated.

In one respect, it’s not surprising that hiring is slowing now. Job growth in 2021 and 2022, as the economy rebounded from the COVID-19 recession, was the most explosive on record. Workers had an advantage they hadn’t had in decades. Companies struggled to hire quickly enough to keep up with rising sales. Many employers had to raise wages and offer bonuses to retain workers.

It was inevitable—even healthy, economists say, over the long term—that hiring would slow, easing pressure on wages and inflation. Otherwise, the economy could overheat and force the Fed to tighten credit so aggressively that it would trigger a recession.

The post-pandemic job market boom was a stark contrast to the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09, when it took the economy more than six years to recover lost jobs. By contrast, the staggering 22 million job losses from the pandemic in 2020 were reversed in less than 2 1/2 years.

Still, the growing economy stoked inflation, prompting the Fed to raise interest rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023 to try to cool the labor market and slow inflation. And for a while, the economy and the job market seemed immune to higher borrowing costs. Consumers kept spending, businesses kept expanding, and the economy kept growing.

But eventually, persistently high interest rates began to take their toll. Several high-profile companies, including tech giants like Spotify, announced layoffs last year in the face of high interest rates. But outside the tech sector of the economy and, to a lesser extent, finance, most U.S. companies haven’t shed jobs. The number of people filing first-time unemployment claims is barely higher than it was before the pandemic struck.

However, the same companies that retain employees do not necessarily hire more of them.

“It’s a lot harder than it was a year or two ago, especially for people who are new to the industry,” Glassdoor’s Terrazas said. “Because of the gradual decline in layoffs in the tech and finance industries, a lot of highly skilled, experienced people have entered the professional services market over the past year and a half.

“All the evidence suggests they’re finding jobs. But at the same time, they’re pushing more and more people who are new to the job market down the line…. Recent graduates, people who don’t have a lot of work experience, are suddenly feeling the effects of competing with people who have two, five, 10 years of experience in the job market. When these big fish are in, the little fish naturally get squeezed out.”