Growth Without Jobs Isn’t a Paradox

Hello! 👋

It’s Thursday, 19^th February 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts. Most weeks, I try to take one messy signal from the world and turn it into something you can actually use. Not a headline. Not a hot take. A lens.

This week’s lens came from a Bloomberg story about a strange contradiction: forecasts stay upbeat while jobs data looks weak. I wrote a short LinkedIn post on it yesterday, but the longer version has been sitting with me because it isn’t really about the U.S. It’s about the shape of modern growth.

You can feel it in different accents everywhere.

A founder in Bangalore tells you revenue is up, but they are not adding headcount. A team in London hits targets with a hiring freeze that quietly becomes permanent. A manager in Dubai says, “we’re expanding,” and then you learn the expansion is tooling, not teams. A factory in Shenzhen upgrades equipment and the output rises, while the hiring board stays blank.

Same movie, different subtitles.

We’ve had “jobless recoveries” before. This feels different. This feels like a new default creeping in.

Here’s what changed, in plain terms.

For most of the last century, growth needed bodies. If demand rose, you hired. If you wanted to scale, you recruited. Labor was the throttle. Even when companies used machines, the bottleneck was still people: supervisors, coordinators, analysts, operators, customer support, sales enablement. The org chart expanded because the work expanded.

Then software did something subtle. It made coordination cheap.

Email replaced runners. Spreadsheets replaced clerks. Cloud replaced rooms full of servers. Then automation replaced a slice of repetitive operations. And now AI is replacing a chunk of “first draft” work: the first pass analysis, the first pass copy, the first pass support response, the first pass code, the first pass research. Not perfectly. Not always. But enough that the old equation breaks. Creation skills are being replaced by reviewing skills.

Output can rise without hours rising in the same proportion.

That is the root of jobless growth. Not a conspiracy. Not a collapse. A new kind of operating leverage.

And once companies taste that leverage, they change their behavior in ways that ripple far beyond a single quarter.

They stop hiring “just in case”. They hire only when pain is undeniable. They squeeze more from existing teams because the tools make it possible. They delay backfills. They keep roles open as placeholders. They treat headcount like a permanent cost, not a growth engine. They learn that the safest way to improve performance is to buy capability, not onboard complexity.

This is why jobless growth feels emotionally confusing. Your brain expects the world to match the story you learned.

“The economy is doing okay, so jobs should be okay”.

But the economy isn’t a single thing. It’s a collection of systems. And one of those systems, the labor market, can tighten even when the rest looks healthy.

In fact, jobless growth often looks healthiest on paper.

Companies report productivity gains. Margins improve. Earnings stabilize. Investment flows into equipment and software. Leaders talk about “efficiency” and “focus”. The numbers say progress. The hiring pipeline says pause.

If you’re inside a company, you’ve probably seen a version of this conversation.

“We’re not in trouble.”
“But we’re not hiring either.”

“We’re investing.”
“But not in people.”

The uncomfortable insight is that both sides can be true at the same time. And that is exactly what changes the social contract of work.

Because when the ladder stops expanding, the entire experience of work shifts.

Entry-level becomes brutally competitive, not because everyone suddenly got worse, but because the number of “learning roles” shrinks. Teams keep seniors because seniors are reliable. Juniors used to be a bet you made because growth demanded hands. Now the bet feels optional. When the bet is optional, it disappears more often than people want to admit.

Mid-career gets cautious. People cling to stability because switching feels riskier. The market becomes “low-hire, low-fire” which sounds calm until you realize it traps people in place. It creates a strange kind of stagnation inside a world that is supposedly moving fast.

And the most corrosive effect shows up in trust.

When hiring slows, job listings become less honest. Not because every company is malicious, but because the incentives drift. Roles stay up “just in case”. Recruiters keep pipelines warm without urgency. Old postings linger because nobody owns cleanup. Aggregators scrape everything anyway, so the internet fills with copies of roles that do not really exist anymore. This is a problem we are solving with Fursa

So the job seeker gets hit twice: fewer real openings, and more noise.

This is the part i care about deeply because it’s not macro theory. It’s lived friction. If you have ever sent twenty applications into silence, you know the difference between rejection and ambiguity. Rejection is painful but clean. Ambiguity eats your attention, your confidence, your time. It turns effort into doubt.

Jobless growth doesn’t just reduce opportunity. It increases uncertainty.

Now zoom out one more level. The global reason this matters isn’t “AI will take all jobs”. That headline is too blunt to be useful. The real shift is more specific:

That changes how you should navigate work, whether you’re a leader or an individual.

If you’re job hunting, the old strategy was volume. Apply broadly, trust the funnel, wait for the market to do its thing. In a jobless-growth world, volume breaks you because the funnel is polluted and tools like LinkedIn or Indeed do not serve you. You need tighter loops and stronger proof. Treat your search like sales, not like hope. Fewer targets, deeper research, clearer positioning, and tangible artifacts that reduce perceived risk. When companies are conservative, they don’t buy potential. They buy certainty.

If you’re leading a team, the temptation is to celebrate efficiency and ignore the human cost. That is how cultures quietly rot. If you can grow without hiring, then your culture becomes a retention system, not a vibe. Your internal mobility becomes a moral and strategic obligation. Your training becomes the ladder you are no longer building externally. If you don’t create paths inside, people will interpret “efficiency” as “no future here.”

And if you’re building products, jobless growth should change what you build.

In boom times, people buy tools to go faster. In jobless-growth times, people buy tools to do more with less, and to reduce waste caused by uncertainty. That’s why anything that improves signal quality beats anything that adds more noise. Better information. Cleaner inventory. Fewer dead ends. Faster feedback. The winners won’t be the loudest platforms. They’ll be the ones that make reality easier to see.

That’s the heart of this moment. This is a bet that I am taking with my businesses and I think you can also take away something from it.

The economy can expand, and you can still feel stuck. That feeling isn’t laziness. It’s a rational response to a system that is rebalancing power from labor to leverage.

The question isn’t whether this is “good” or “bad”. The question is what you do when the rules change quietly, without asking for permission.

If you reply to this email with one line, make it this: where are you seeing jobless growth show up in your world? Thank you for reading.

Best,
Kartik

I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.