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New labor market entrants face significant hurdles when searching for a job, with these stressors likely amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we consider how COVID-induced job search anxiety—feeling anxious about one’s job search due to issues imposed by the pandemic—has the potential to affect adaptive, goal-directed efforts, and maladaptive, goal-avoidant reactions. We theorize that this anxiety can prompt job seekers to engage in problem-solving pondering and affect-focused rumination, with these experiences relating to whether job seekers engage in various forms of search-related efforts the following week. In particular, we consider whether job seekers are engaging in dream job search effort (ie, effort toward pursuing one’s dream job), as well as focused (ie, effort toward a selection of carefully screened jobs), exploratory (ie, effort toward a wide swath of jobs in a broad manner), and …