With a compact mirror in one hand and an eyelash curler in the other, Grace Xu told her roughly 300,000 TikTok followers she was likely about to be laid off.

She was right, she tells them in a subsequent clip. But she was planning to pursue a different career anyway: as a content creator.

"I guess the decision has been made on my behalf," she tells viewers in the video posted earlier this year. "The universe has spoken."

By all accounts, the U.S. job market is holding strong, with employers adding 303,000 workers to their payrolls in March. The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for 26 str...