Job seekers encounter a ‘brutal and frustrating’ hiring market in e-commerce

Now, he spends four or five hours a day networking or scrolling through job boards. And now, he’s starting to experiencing some of the things others have been venting about on LinkedIn for months: An automatic rejection email, sent at 12:50 a.m; A job posted on Workday seemingly just as a formality, only for the company to promote someone internally; A job that remains open for months on end, leading Nate to wonder: was the company ever really hiring for this role in the first place?

“I understand where people are coming from, when they say it feels like they’re putting stuff into a black hole,” Nate said. 

None of these experiences are unique to e-commerce. The U.S. is undergoing what several journalists and economists have called a “white-collar recession,” as corporations course-correct from the overhiring they did during Covid. While there’s little data on how many layoffs took place in the e-commerce industry specifically, the layoffs tracker Layoff.AI estimates that 130,482 people have been laid off by tech companies in 2024. That’s on top of the more than 260,000 workers laid off by tech companies last year – which includes the waves of layoffs executed by e-commerce giants like Amazon. 

Vanguard estimates that the hiring rate for people making more than $96,000 a year is the worst it’s been since 2014, excluding 2020. “If you make a six-figure salary, it really is a bad time to be looking for a job,” Aki Ito, chief correspondent at Business Insider wrote.

“This is the most brutal and frustrating market I’ve been through,” said Liam, also not his real name. In total, Modern Retail spoke with 10 people in the industry, most of whom are actively looking for jobs, and a few who recently got hired. Most were granted anonymity, and have had their names changed, in order to more freely discuss a sensitive topic.

“I’m finding this to be a really challenging job market,” said Sophie, a marketer with nearly 20 years of experience, who has been looking for eight months. “It’s the longest it’s ever taken me to find a job.” 

All of the job seekers interviewed for this article have anywhere from eight to 25 years of experience in e-commerce. Most work in marketing, though others have held senior-level positions in departments like data and analytics or the international division of an e-commerce business. They’ve held a variety of roles, from a director all the way up to a CMO. They’ve worked for a wide range of brands, spanning both eight-figure startups and public companies worth billions of dollars. 

All of them acknowledged that, as they become more senior, there will naturally be fewer and fewer job opportunities available. And there are fewer startups to attach a name behind, as the funding for those companies has also waned.

Anish Shah, CEO of executive recruiting firm Ruckus, however, doesn’t think this is necessarily the most challenging year to be looking for e-commerce jobs as more companies had layoffs in 2022 and 2023.

He said his firm — anecdotally — is “seeing an uptick in business in the last six months, in terms of companies looking to hire.”

But for more senior roles, like a CMO or a vp, the expectation to do more with less persists, job seekers told Modern Retail. Multiple sources described companies seemingly wanting someone who can both be strategic and in-the-weeds, someone who can create a marketing strategy and execute it with a bare-bones team. According to Shah, companies often say they are looking for someone who is “scrappy” or “technical in nature,” or can be a “player-coach” when looking to make these types of hires.

Or, companies want someone who is good at both brand and growth marketing – functions that have historically, been siloed from one another. 

“A lot of companies want this unicorn CMO,” said Liam, who has held a variety of senior and C-suite level roles at companies ranging from eight-figure brands to publicly-traded retailers. “They want the Don Draper – a beautiful storyteller with a cigarette in his mouth. And then they want the data-driven performance marketer all in one. There are very few people out there that are like that.”

Shah echoed that companies are taking their time to make “one or two star hires” in lieu of building a full team. Especially at startups, what might have previously been a six-person team in 2019 is now a three-person team. 

He added, “this makes it a lot harder for the job seeker.” That results in a slower, more cautious hiring process because the company “is going to be banking a lot on one or two hires.” 

But, because there are so many candidates on the market, companies can afford to be picky. Sophie has held a variety of senior marketing roles at beauty brands, though her most recent full-time roles weren’t in beauty. When she’s tried to pitch herself for jobs at beauty brands, she’s been told by multiple agencies and recruiters they’re looking for people currently working in the industry. 

Another frustration voiced by many of the job seekers Modern Retail spoke to was a disconnect between the various people hiring for a role at a particular company. Oftentimes, this disconnect was between the desires of the leaders in the interview process, whether it be a recruiter, hiring manager, or another executive.

Sophie said she was in talks with one company for four months, and that the recruiter – who was her primary point of contact — said the company kept waffling over whether it wanted to hire a vp or CMO.

Eric, who interviewed for a variety of executive roles over the past year, described one case in which the title and responsibilities of the job changed throughout the interview process.

“It just spoke to these big misalignments between what the recruiters thought they were looking for and what the hiring manager thought they were hiring for,” Eric said.

Shah said such a misalignment has been an issue for “as long as I’ve been [in recruiting].” He advises companies to think about “what does this hire need to be in the top 1% in the world at?” and start by focusing on that one thing. 

This role discrepancy may be exacerbated by the fact that the e-commerce industry has undergone some significant transformations over the past two years. Apple’s iOS 14 update upended how companies approach customer acquisition, with a greater focus on diversifying beyond Meta-owned channels. More brands that were previously DTC-only are also increasingly betting on wholesale or owned retail stores for growth. And, in a tough economic environment, more companies are prioritizing profitability rather than growth-at-all costs.

This perfect storm of conditions has resulted in a job market that feels very different to this mid-high and senior-level talent. Five years ago, in the boom times, they were used to hearing from a steady stream of recruiters, even when they weren’t actively looking for jobs. 

Eric has spent the last eight years in the e-commerce startup world, and came up through the industry at a time when he and most of his peers “found their jobs serendipitously, or through networks when the market was really robust.” He acknowledged that this past year was the first time when he’s properly gone through a search for executive-level roles, but said that “I did find the search to be pretty laborious and quite frustrating.”

Other frustrations cited by job seekers are more natural byproducts of a market where companies have more leverage than job seekers: Recruiters ghosting candidates after an interview; Candidates being met with radio silence after being one of hundreds of people to apply for an open job on LinkedIn. 

The salary ranges being posted for open roles are mostly on the lower end compared to previous years. Multiple sources who are seeking jobs estimated that salaries are down as much as 20% to 30% for more senior-level roles, depending on the role and company size.

Shah, for his part, said, “We have not seen salaries dipping to, like, ridiculous levels.” He acknowledged, however, that “we do have a lot of clients who ask for the salaries to be really low versus market rate. We have taken on a few of those searches, and frankly, it has not yielded them these magical, phenomenal candidates.” 

“What I suspect is happening is [companies] are really trying to reduce their G&A,” Laura, who has held a variety of CMO and VP roles, said. “As a result, they are focused in the short-term marketing tactics that drive immediate revenue,” she said. In turn, she said they’re trying to “make do without real, full-funnel marketing” – and the senior talent that can execute that. 

Breaking through in a tough market 

Shah’s advice to job seekers is to think about “what you’re the best 1% in the world at.” It might seem counterintuitive in a market where companies are looking for leaders who can do everything, but a narrow focus helps resumes stand out.

He gave a hypothetical example of someone looking for a director-level job in product management. “Immediately say at the top of your resume: product management leader, led product management for company XYZ,” he said. “Grew it from you, know, X dollars to Y dollars, and you launched these three prime products… go down the rabbit hole of being very narrow in product management.” What he doesn’t want to see, he said, is someone who lists their experience as “product management, marketing, CFO, COO [and] operations.”

Among the job seekers that Modern Retail spoke with, many of them said that they’ve responded to the challenging job market by trying to network more. But the rub is: these are people who have been in the industry for years who have a lot of connections.

“I have good relationships [with recruiters],” Laura said. “They do not have the jobs. And so it’s a constant, proactive outreach on my part.” She said she’s also trying to be more active on LinkedIn to build her personal brand. 

Still, connections have been paramount to the people who did end up getting full-time roles. Eric ended up taking a job at a company that had tried to recruit him before. Grace, a performance marketer with roughly 10 years of experience, jumped straight into freelancing when she was laid off last year. She ended up taking a full-time job recently with a company that was a freelance client of hers. 

All of the people who are actively looking for a job right now said that they, like Grace, are taking on freelancing or consulting work to pay the bills. Some are grappling with whether to continue consulting full-time. Some are considering whether to switch industries, especially if they’ve been through multiple layoffs within the past several years. And even in a tough job market, they’re closely scrutinizing the customer acquisition goals or the runways of the companies they’re interviewing for, to ensure they don’t end up at yet another company with unrealistic growth goals.

Take Brittney, who has held multiple vp and director-level roles, mostly for beauty and wellness brands. She’s looking for a vp of DTC or vp of marketing role at say, a $10 million to $50 million brand. She’s also been on the job market multiple times over the past three years due to layoffs.

Brittney would be open to changing industries, but said, “I think in this job market, it’s kind of hard to make those pivots if you don’t have direct experience.” So right now, she’s doing fractional consulting work to see if it’s something that she can make work for her in the long run. Sh’s still interviewing for full-time roles, but she’s looking for “something that’s very established – an existing role that they have that’s replacing someone, or they have a clear runway in terms of profit.”

She’s come across a number of volatile brands over the years, she said. And ultimately, “I’m at a point in my career that I just don’t want to commit full-time to those types of companies.”