With a comfortable amount of savings to back her up, Lena Ng assumed that quitting her full-time job as a client account manager, despite not having another job lined up, was a risk worth taking to spend more time with her child. 

She took this leap of faith in December last year and began seriously job hunting in March, but to this day, she has yet to secure a new role. 

The 32-year-old told AsiaOne that over the past few months, she has applied to more than 300 jobs, and a few companies had even brought her through multiple rounds of interviews. 

While she believed she was a strong fit for several of these positions — with interviewers echoing the same sentiments — none of them resulted in a job offer. 

"It is very demoralising, for sure, and I feel very lost and anxious," she shared, adding that her predicament began affecting her mental health negatively.

Lena is not alone in this bleak job search. According to the Ministry of Manpower, Singapore's overall unemployment rate was 1.9 per cent in 2023. From 2024 to March this year, this increased slightly to 2.0 per cent. 

Between March and June this year, the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed persons declined from 1.64 to 1.35, as the number of vacancies continued to fall. During the same period, the recruitment rate dropped from 1.8 per cent in the first quarter to to 1.6 per cent in the second quarter. 

Lena shared that the stress from being unable to secure a job has led to many sleepless nights and self-doubt. 

"I started blaming myself. I wondered what was wrong with me," she said. 

In the midst of these dark periods, she would think of her daughter to encourage herself. 

"I cannot give up because of her, I cannot just settle," Lena shared. 

In the meantime, to make ends meet, she does TikTok livestreaming and children's face painting. 

Dave Peter Ho is someone who is in a similar predicament as Lena, with the added challenge of being a fresh graduate. 

It has been almost a year since he graduated from Nanyang Technological University, but the business school fresh graduate has struggled to secure a corporate job despite applying to more than 200 roles in e-commerce, tech sales and business development across the span of seven months. 

"It's been demoralising and super draining because it's a lengthy process and involves many, many months of interviews," Dave told AsiaOne, adding that there were several instances where he had made it through multiple rounds of interviews, only to be dropped at the final stage. 

But the 27-year-old shared that around 90 per cent of the time, companies either ghost him midway or never respond to his applications at all. 

"Whenever this happened, I felt helpless, very demoralised and quite lost. Because when these companies ghost me, I don't know whether I've really been rejected or if they still need some time to think about it," he shared. 

At the start of his job search, Dave had been optimistic about his career prospects because he had interned at a reputable company from May to August 2024, a few months before he graduated.

"I thought that it would help me land a job more easily but it wasn't the case," he shared. 

He isn't the only affected fresh graduate. 

The latest annual graduate employment surveys conducted by local universities and polytechnics show that fewer of their fresh graduates secured full-time employment in 2024.

For fresh graduates from universities, 79.5 per cent of them secured full-time jobs in 2024, down from 84.1 per cent in 2023.

A lot more at https://www.asiaone.com/lifestyle/i-felt-helpless-demoralised-and-lost-unemployed-singaporeans-share-their-mental-health