'Doomjobbing' can hurt your job search, experts say: Why it happens and how to avoid it

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. …