After spending a year looking for a job, Erin Strawn finally found one. She started working as an IT systems administrator at a local nonprofit in January.
A lot had changed since Strawn was last hired more than a decade ago. She left that job in 2023 to take care of her children. She started looking again in late 2024 after her spouse got laid off.
“This time around, it was a lot harder to get interviews,” said Strawn, who lives in Aurora. “I was looking at job postings on LinkedIn, Indeed and other platforms and you feel like there’s a ton of jobs. And then you start applying to them and you just do not hear anything back.”
Strawn joined 140,000 Coloradans looking for work when she began her search. At the same time the number of open jobs was in decline. Major tech companies had ordered employees to get back to the office and then began shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs to embrace artificial intelligence. A new president inspired trade wars, federal funding and job cuts. That left many business leaders uncertain about future hiring and expansion. Last year, Colorado lost jobs for the first time since 2020.
Strawn changed her strategy.
“I had wanted to have a remote position so that I was at home in case I needed to do anything with my kids,” she said. “But I ended up switching to apply for hybrid or in-person roles. I seemed to get better luck in even getting interviews.”
She also applied only to openings that were just a week or two old. She did not apply to any remote-only gigs.
“I ended up getting three interviews, including for the position I currently have,” she said. “For this job, I feel like it was luck with the timing. What they were looking for lined up really well with the experience I had. They told me after I was hired that they ended up getting hundreds of applicants from out of state. And this is a position that’s hybrid, like you have to be here four out of five days. Obviously, they were able to filter those candidates out.”
It’s hard to beat good luck — and timing.
Gone are the days when employers were desperately trying to find workers. In 2022, there were three job openings for every unemployed Coloradan.
“That was not real,” said Ron Hetrick, principal economist with labor-researcher Lightcast. “It created a false sense of what a labor market looks like. It looked like people were quitting jobs and getting $30,000 pay increases. That’s fictitious. It was the result of just an insane infusion of cash into our economy during the pandemic.”
As of December, there was one opening for every job seeker. Last year, openings fell 10.6% over the year, and dropped 47.9% from 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
One job seeker said that her spouse began looking for a new job in construction services during the heyday. He received multiple offers and, because he could, asked for six weeks of vacation. More recently, in seeking a promotion internally, he found out he was at the top of the salary range, plus no one else in the space had six weeks of vacation. He took his name out of the running.
Companies flush with cash and who had access to low-interest capital overhired professional workers.
“Now, it is severely hung over from the party,” Hetrick said.
Job openings in Colorado, he said, are now around 110,000, or about where the estimate was in 2017 and 2018. “And no one was really complaining in 2017 and 2018.”
For employers, the numbers have calmed down, leading some to venture back out in recent months and post a help wanted ad. In the first three months this year, openings are up 23%, according to Lightcast, which scrapes thousands of job boards, though April numbers may change because of the U.S. war in Iran.
“Employers are hiring — but more cautiously. Companies are taking longer to make decisions, interviewing more candidates, and looking for extremely precise fits for their open roles,” said Andrew Hudson, who posts fresh Denver-area jobs in his Andrew Hudson’s Job List newsletter.
Over at Denver Workforce Development, the agency has noticed that employers are averaging 10 days longer to hire, said Bret Walker, director of Denver Workforce Development.
“We’re hearing more and more employers are doing multiple interviews instead of just one,” Walker said. “I think they’re just taking some extra time on some hiring.”
Interest in openings has steadily increased, especially at Denver International Airport, which works with 500 private companies for a combined workforce of around 40,000 people. About 1,400 are city employees
Back in 2021, an airport concessions job fair had 1,000 openings but only 100 people showed up to apply, Denver 7 reported. Two years later, at its annual job fair in August, there were 500 job openings and 450 attendees, which was considered to be in the top three for attendance of all time, officials said at the time.
A year later, 550 job seekers showed up for about 300 openings. And last year, DEN attracted 1,037 job seekers for about 250 openings, said Bret Walker, director of Denver Workforce Development.
“We know that there are more applicants applying for fewer jobs,” Walker said. “But we’re still encouraged by the employment numbers that we’re seeing.”
No longer a job seeker’s market
It’s been a little bit of a shock for anyone who’s been out of the labor force for a while. After taking a few years off to care for her grandparents, Emmy Bosio, who lives in Denver, rejoined Colorado’s labor force about seven months ago.
“When I started looking for a new position, I thought, ‘Well, nothing will be worse than looking for a job in September of 2001 right after 9/11, which is the last time I was looking,’ said Bosio, who spent two decades working in higher education administering the U.S. Fulbright Program. “As it turns out, it has proven to be equally challenging. If not more.”
One morning last month, a job popped up on her radar. It seemed to exactly match her skills and experience as someone who had administered a corporate fellowship program. She went to the company’s website to make sure it was real. She tweaked her resume and wrote a new cover letter. Then she had to run to pick up one of her kids.
“By the time I got back to my desk at 3:30, the position, when I clicked to submit, was gone from their website. Like, the job doesn’t exist anymore,” she said. “And the posting was two days old!”
A friend of hers who’s been job hunting for nine months called it a “ghost post,” or jobs that seemingly vanish. Congress has even looked into them.
Hetrick, with Lightcast, said that the term “ghosting” has been around for decades. It’s a term that appears “anytime the market gets kind of stinky,” he said. That includes during the labor shortage in 2021 when Colorado employers shared tales of job applicants who didn’t respond and new hires who stopped going to work after day one.
There are legitimate reasons behind why applicants feel ghosted. Companies may be required to post the job even if an internal candidate has already been identified. Or they keep the job listing up in case the new hire doesn’t work out. Or they’re waiting for the perfect candidate. Illegal reasons include fishing for credentials, or are fraudulent. Some may even post a fake job so their competitors think they’re hiring but they have no intention of hiring someone.
To avoid the worst, look for fresh listings and ignore the ones that look too good to be true, like a remote gig that pays $300,000, he said. Stay away from remote-only jobs since “every single other person across the globe can apply for those,” he said.
“A lot of people who are frustrated right now don’t understand that when you apply for a remote job, you’re one out of 1,000 people that applied a couple hours after the thing was posted,” Hetrick said. “You’d be much better off applying for the ones that are local, that have an office where you can walk in and talk to someone. That’s how most people get jobs. They don’t get jobs through job boards.”
Hudson, who works with employers and job seekers, shared similar advice. Companies rely on employee referrals, internal candidates and industry or professional connections.
“Another shift in today’s job market is how many roles are filled before they are widely advertised,” he said. “In many sectors, more than half of hires occur without a traditional public job posting.”
Bosio uses her network to get introductions to hiring managers. That’s helped her get interviews and learn more about the job process. For one opening where she was a finalist, she learned they had had over 300 applicants. At another, the company told her they received 225 applications in the first 48 hours. For employers that have responded to her, she estimates that the turnaround time for learning whether she’s getting an interview or passed over is three to four weeks.
While there’s been no job offer yet, Bosio said that she’s getting good insight. One interviewer told her that she was glad someone alerted her to Bosio’s resume saying “your resume didn’t really connect with me when I was looking,” Bosio said. “I thought, well that’s really interesting that my resume didn’t read in the way that I thought it read. I’ve had to go back and make a lot of changes and edits in terms of making sure it is more readable and a little less technical.”
Not quite an employer’s market either
TransDev, a transit company with multiple locations in the Denver area, desperately needs more bus and shuttle drivers. The job starts at $28.02 an hour and there’s a $4,000 sign-on bonus. Drivers get paid during the six weeks of training.
But in order to get hired, applicants need a Class B commercial learner’s permit to drive a truck or 40-foot bus, said Ann Craig, a human resources manager for the company that subcontracts with RTD.
They used to offer classes to get the permit but “we were finding that people would come to the class, get their permit and then we’d never see them again,” Craig said.
Non-office jobs dominate the job openings market in Colorado, according to recent data from Lightcast. Nursing tops the list, as it has for years, followed by retail sales, truck drivers and retail supervisors.
United Airlines, which has been in expansion mode at DEN for the past several years, plans to hire 1,200 more people in Denver this year, compared to 1,400 last year, according to a spokesperson.
An affiliate of Philip Morris International Inc., which is opening a manufacturing plant in Aurora, hopes to hire 500 for the facility. At a recent job fair, more than 400 registered ahead of time. That day, 275 showed up, with 200 “in the first two hours alone,” which is a promising sign, Kelly Freeman, the company’s people and culture manager for Aurora, wrote in an email.
But many roles are more complicated, and that requires more time to find the right person. Over at recycling-automation developer AMP in Louisville, software engineer roles are “still getting thousands and thousands of applicants,” said recruiter Jodi Parsell.
But another opening with no college degree requirement has attracted just dozens of candidates. It’s a way to get into an AI company, but the candidate needs electrical or utility experience.
Beth Dec, AMP’s chief administrative officer, said the job market “remains nuanced” for the the Louisville company, which has raised more than $270 million from investors, builds waste-sorting facilities that use automation, AI and robots so humans don’t have to pick out what’s recyclable, what’s compostable and what is trash.
“The challenge isn’t just about filling roles — it’s about finding individuals with the right mix of technical expertise, adaptability, and alignment with our mission to modernize the waste and recycling industry through technology,” Dec said in an email. “In some cases, that means roles stay open longer while we look for the best fit.”
Health care jobs so in demand, people are changing careers
And then there’s the health care industry, which always seems to have a ton of job openings both state- and nationwide. Nurse practitioners ranked as the number one in-demand occupation in Colorado based on a 10-year growth rate of 62%, according to Colorado’s 2025 Talent Pipeline Report, which looked at wages and job forecasts for 850 occupations.
Stats like that appealed to Nicole Speer, who is changing careers after losing her job of 13 years in July. The research facility at the University of Colorado where she’d worked as an administrator lost its federal funding.
Speer, who has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and a background in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging, spent six months searching for a new job targeting science-related jobs or even policy and lobbying, based on her experience as a Boulder City Council member.
She said she couldn’t even get an interview and toyed with applying for an hourly wage job. But since her partner was employed, they decided they could get by on one income a bit longer. She enrolled in Front Range Community College last February in pursuit of becoming a nurse and found herself having “to retake classes that I took about 30 years ago,” she said.
The plan is to get a nursing job. And when her body can’t handle the physical requirements, she hopes to transition to teaching nursing or work in administration to manage data around nursing. “For me, when it came to considering what else to do, health care was one of the few areas that seems like it’s hiring,” Speer said. “I don’t see it as a field that is going to meet its needs anytime soon.”
That seems likely. UCHealth, the state’s largest health care and hospital system, has 2,000 openings on its job board. Nearly 25% are for nursing professionals.
It used to have more, said Angela Spinelli, UCHealth’s senior director for talent acquisition.
“None of us are going to forget the pandemic,” Spinelli said. “Shortly after the pandemic, UCHealth had around 4,000 jobs on the job board. Those were not normal numbers for us. Two thousand is more stabilized, more normal numbers before and after the pandemic.”
Most openings attract maybe 20 applicants. Few get close to a 100.
One of the most challenging jobs to fill is radiography technologists, or workers trained to use X-ray and imaging equipment like a CT scan and MRI. BLS occupational description says “rad techs” require an associate’s degree, are growing 5% faster than all other occupations and have a median annual wage of $80,510 in Colorado. UCHealth currently has 45 openings.
“When we post a radiography technologist job, it’s really not enough to post and pray that people are going to apply. We have to proactively partner with schools to capture new graduates,” she said. “We also have our own educational program at UCHealth where we hire individuals and put them through radiography technology programs so that we can grow our own rad techs.”
UCHealth has hired 50 rad tech graduates in the past year and has another 12 in its UCHealth Ascend program. Another 30 are enrolled in partner programs at local universities. There were 65 rad-tech openings this week.
Because of the number of openings, the organization has recruiting events weekly — every Thursday between noon to 2 p.m. (register here for the next one). Anyone interested in a UCHealth job can chat with recruiters online.
“The most important thing to remember is that we really are looking for candidates that are a good fit for UCHealth,” Spinelli advised.
Read up on the company’s mission. Share your team work experience and customer service. Let them know if you’ve been a caregiver for a parent or grandparent.
“That stands out for us,” she said. “We do read every single applicant’s resume that we get.”