The Jobs Report, by SheetsResume.com - Newsletter 03

Hello! Here is Issue #3 of your semi-regular, demi-monthly, hemi-spherical Sheets Resume newsletter (because unless you're on the ISS, you're reading this from at least one of the Earth's hemispheres).

Once again, I'm proud to say that there was zero AI used and zero puppies killed in the creation of this newsletter.

As always, here are the 4 things in the Newsletter:

1. an update on the US jobs market
2. something useful for your job hunt
3. a Sheets Resume success story
4. something objectively funny
5. a fifth thing, maybe (none today, sorry)

So read on, or don't! Your call, I'm not your father. (...Son?)

1. The US has now lost manufacturing jobs 4 months in a row, losing another 12,000 manufacturing jobs in August.

Turns out, the centuries of extensive literature warning us about protectionism were correct. Who knew? (Besides literally everyone who has taken Econ 101.)

I mean, aside from studying the last time we tried tariffs in 1930 – when the global trade market shrunk by 65%, US exports dropped by 61%, and prolonged unemployment rose sharply – there's literally no way anyone could have foreseen the negative repercussions of launching a hastily (dare I say, improvisationally?) executed trade war versus every single country on Earth, all at the same time.

It's almost like tariffs and central planning don't protect or create jobs, and only innovation and free market competition can do that. But I guess that's just the lib in me talking; everyone knows only dumb libs like free markets.

4th wall break: in case you can't tell, I absolutely despise where we are in American societal discourse right now.

And it's not just manufacturing – the US economy has only added 29,000 a month on average over the last 3 months... this stretch marks the slowest 3-month jobs growth rate since 2010, when we were at the bottom of the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. In "normal" years, in the before-times, in the long-long-ago, we used to regularly add hundreds of thousands of new jobs, each and every month.

In fact, if you remove government jobs from the equation (because yes, DOGE did its thing), the private sector has only added 74,000 jobs per month on average in 2025, less than half the trailing 12-month average of 149,000 jobs added per month in 2024. But digging a little deeper, of the 74k average private sector jobs added this year are almost entirely in healthcare, with 64k of the 74k in the health sector.

So no, you're not crazy, and it's not just you – this is a heinous job market.

It’s almost like improvising a global trade war, punishing American companies with illegally and autocratically enacted taxes on their manufacturing inputs, targeting and attacking corporations individually, seizing equity in and nationalizing American firms, unceremoniously dumping 300,000 civil servants into the private labor market, arresting undocumented workers (1 in every 16 employees) at their jobs at farms / restaurants / construction sites, and militarizing the streets of major US cities yields… a negative (??) economic environment, consumer sentiment, and job market? Go figure.

2. Something Useful for Your Job Hunt – 50 Non-LinkedIn Job Boards

Struggling to find real jobs to apply to? Tired of applying to jobs on LinkedIn with thousands of applicants after only a few hours? Paranoid that your applications on Indeed actually just get sucked straight into Gargantua, the black hole from Christopher Nolan's 2014 masterpiece Interstellar?

Check out our handy-dandy list of 50 niche job boards, with 50 neatly organized job boards you've probably never heard of, broken down by category. From remote jobs to green jobs to sales jobs to mom jobs, we've got you covered with this comprehensive list of job boards that won't make you want to break your laptop in half.

3. Success Story: Google, Apple, and OpenAI fight over a Sheets Resume candidate. How freaking cool is this:

4. Something funny

I lol'd at this.

Alright, that's the Sheets Resume newsletter! If you liked this and would enjoy more of my writing – especially the political rants – I'm considering writing more about topical events (economics, society, and politics) if you want to preemptively subscribe to my currently empty Substack.

New Podcast – "Resume Listening"

Oh, one more thing! My business partner Nate and I did our first "podcast" together, where we discuss some of our old recruiting horror stories from the 2010s. We're both busy people with full-time jobs, other companies, and families, so we hope 20 minutes isn't too short for Episode 1! But if you want to get to know the two recruiting minds behind the Internet's most popular Resume Template, watch the first episode of the podcast we're calling, "Resume Listening".

Sheets Resume – AI Job Search Tools

As always, don't forget to utilize our AI Resume Builder (free temporary access available to anyone facing financial constraints, just ask), Cover Letter Generator (totally free), AI Job Search (new!), AI Interview Practice (our AI interviewer sounds like me, not ChatGPT), our popular free Resume Template, and basic Free Resume Builder (non-AI, manual editing, but still pretty sweet).

Good luck out there! Stay positive, stay focused, keep applying, and good things will come.