Cynthia Mejia, a research compliance coordinator with North Memorial Health, and her husband Amauris, a district sales leader for Frito-Lay, work together from their home office on Feb. 7 in Rosemount. The two have been looking for part-time jobs to supplement their full-time work since moving here from New York about six years ago. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Cynthia Mejia really wants to work.

Since moving to the Twin Cities about six years ago, she and her husband, Amauris, have been searching for part-time jobs to supplement what they earn working full-time. Though the cost of living here is lower than their native New York, rising prices have meant cutting back on restaurants, giving up their gym membership and letting their dog’s food nearly run out before buying more.

It would seem that nabbing one of the part-time jobs for which the Rosemount couple have applied would not be too hard, given how many employers are struggling to find workers. In Minnesota — where job openings have outnumbered job seekers since 2021 — most vacancies are in sectors reliant on part-time or seasonal workers to operate cash registers, wait tables or prep food for an hourly wage.

Yet the Mejias still haven’t landed a side hustle.

“Every day, I’m searching,” Cynthia Mejia said.

Cynthia Mejia, a research compliance coordinator with North Memorial Health, works from her home office. (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Though part-time shift jobs are plentiful on paper, lack of experience — a roadblock the Mejias are encountering — or inflexible schedules can stop a potential employer cold. In higher-paid professional sectors, part-time options are few and far between and can limit career opportunities down the line. It’s a shift from the post-pandemic labor market, when job seekers held more power.

The U.S. labor market is showing signs of rebounding as the unemployment rate nudges up from a half-century low in 2023, but there are still more jobs than people to fill them. Employers added 143,000 jobs in January, with the biggest gains in health care, retail and social assistance.

Though Minnesota has one of the country’s highest labor force participation rates — nearly 68% compared to about 63% nationally — there were 0.6 job seekers for every job opening as of November, according to the state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).

Employers continue to woo workers with incentives such as higher wages and lower minimum qualifications, like allowing work experience to substitute for education or offering on-the-job training, Angelina Nguyễn, labor market information director for DEED, said at a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis event in January.

“Employers still need to work hard to attract talent and retain talent,” she said.

What employers are willing to accept from job candidates fluctuates with the labor market, similar to how either buyers or sellers can dictate the housing market. Employers' requirements become more stringent when more people are looking for work, said Kathryn Edwards, an independent economic policy consultant.

“A lot of the ‘I can’t find a person' is conditional on ‘given what I require at this moment’ and not ‘that person doesn’t exist,‘” she said.

The go-to barometer for the health of the job market is the unemployment rate, which in January was 4% nationally. But Edwards instead points to the 3.4% hiring rate, which in recent years has stayed low despite the worker shortage. Historically, she noted, a hiring rate that low has come with an average unemployment rate greater than 8%.

“Our labor market is in the middle of a deep, deep recession for people who don’t have a job,” Edwards said.

After a 28-year career as a freelance court reporter, Jackie McKone retired during the pandemic and has been looking for part-time office work since 2022. She’s open to anything — filing paperwork, typing, answering phones, delivering coffee — and has even offered to work for free, just to get out of the house.

“I can’t believe I can’t get a part-time job,” said McKone, of Minneapolis. “I just wonder why employers are so closed off to somebody who has everything that they would need to help them be better but only wants to work 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. a few days a week.”

The U.S. doesn’t have a culture of part-time work beyond low-wage shift work, Edwards said. In 2023, the most recent year of available data, Minnesota reported the greatest number of job vacancies in food-preparation-and-serving-related occupations. This physically demanding sector was also the lowest-paid of those measured, with a median wage offer of $15.25 an hour, or $8.86 adjusted for inflation.

In higher-paid professional fields, opportunities for part-time work are scarce. For people who do work fewer hours in those sectors — often because of caregiving or other personal demands outside of work — it can be hard to find enough time for tasks that lend themselves to career progression, said Colleen Flaherty Manchester, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

“How do you structure a part-time job? What goes into it?” she said. “If it’s just the required stuff, it’s likely to be a dead end.”

Post-pandemic, Manchester said, employers have started turning to contractors who can take on high-paid roles on a temporary basis, rather than hiring regular employees to work fewer hours. The arrangement provides more flexibility for the employer, she said, and can also provide more power for the employee to decide whether they want to take on a particular project.

At the same time, Manchester said, it might be challenging for someone who’s worked on a contract or part-time basis to transition back to full-time work.

Emily Franks' social work role provided a lot of flexibility: She could take her infant son to an appointment during the day and finish her work during off hours as needed. But after a year of balancing motherhood with a full-time job, she decided to take control of her own work schedule.

Franks was already selling Mary Kay on the side when she opened an in-home day care. When her husband also decided to start his own construction business, she launched the Aesthetic Dollar, an online store selling personal budgeting tools.

Being able to set their own hours means the Prior Lake couple has more time with their four children, one of whom has special needs.

“My husband and I say this to each other all the time: ‘How do people that work in 9-to-5 navigate through all of the appointments and all of the therapies and all of the things?’” she said on a recent Monday afternoon as she was driving to pick up her kids from school. “I think it would be hard for me at this stage in my life to go back to something like that.”