After Jonathan Clanton was laid off from his talent acquisition job earlier this year, he immediately began searching for a new role. Clanton, 39, soon found himself spending hours each day scrolling through job listings.

“It felt like a mix of social media addiction plus the anxiety of needing to find work,” he tells CNBC Make It.  

Now there’s a word for that behavior: “doomjobbing,” a combination of doomscrolling and job searching. Driven by the stress of looking for work, some job seekers find themselves constantly refreshing job sites and frantically applying to new roles.

Ilya Bagrak, a product manager based in Los Gatos, California, posted about the term in a March 25 Threads post: “I got laid off two weeks ago,” Bagrak wrote. “My 8 yo daughter saw me spending a lot of time in the LinkedIn app, and she called it ‘doomjobbing.’”

Bagrak, 45, tells CNBC Make It that losing his job created “a lot of uncertainty.” As the primary breadwinner for his family, which includes his wife and two young children, Bagrak says his immediate concerns were about affording healthcare and paying the mortgage.

That stress led him to spend more and more time searching for and applying to jobs online.

Scrolling through job posts may temporarily scratch an emotional itch, says career and leadership coach Phoebe Gavin, but in her experience, it ultimately makes job seekers feel “even more powerless, even more hopeless about when or how their job search is ever going to end.”

Why ‘doomjobbing’ happens

Job search anxiety has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, according to career coach Eliana Goldstein.

“The job market feels harder than it’s ever been,” she says, “and people are feeling so much pressure.”

Many candidates are finding that conventional job search tactics aren’t moving the needle, Goldstein says: “We have traditionally always been taught that if you need to find a job, you go on job sites,” but each new job listing receives a flood of applications “right away.”

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