Looking for a job is already hard enough. But during a coronavirus pandemic, the job search comes with new challenges.

Deciding to move for a job now means weighing the risk of catching an infectious disease in your new hometown, or unknowingly carrying it with you. For those who lost jobs before the spread of COVID-19, job hunting now means competing with millions of other Americans who just lost their jobs, too. For professionals in industries that have been decimated by the coronavirus , the search may mean switching out of your industry forever.

The new interest has felt like it slowed down to a halt, said Kelly Zerbe, a San Francisco-based freelance designer who has been job hunting since February. One company I was scheduled to have an on-site [interview] for had to halt hiring completely because they were a startup in the restaurant industry, which has obviously been impacted greatly.

And all the while, bills pile up.

Professionals told HuffPost how their job hunts have changed because of the coronavirus. These are their stories:

Obtaining professional licensing to work has become an impossible hurdle.

Hannah Reckman, a third-year masters student in speech language pathology at Ohio University, was four months away from graduating when the coronavirus pandemic impacted her career. Now, her graduation has been postponed indefinitely and she is worried about her eligibility to receive the speech language pathologist license she needs to work. The local elementary school where she was completing her off-campus internship shut down indefinitely.

I am also now stuck in my tiny one-bedroom apartment, [having] lost my externship, and will no longer be receiving the clinical hours necessary to graduate and earn my license, she said. Opportunities to earn the necessary clinical hours for the license in hospitals have also dried up, she said.

We are scared, the 24-year-old said of her school cohort. The seven-year-long college education we have all sunk every cent we have into means nothing if it is not completed.

Payton Arnold, a nurse based in Las Vegas, Nevada, said shes applied for 50 jobs since she graduated in early March. Most positions are ones that require solid clinical experience, meaning about a year or more. Obviously new grads do not have that, so lots of us are hoping to get into new grad programs, the 23-year old said.

Getting her nursing license is necessary for these kind of jobs, but Arnold is in limbo. She was supposed to take her National Council Licensure Examination at the end of March, but the computer-based testing company Pearson VUE, which facilitates these exams, temporarily closed their test centers in the United States, causing Arnold to reschedule.

This keeps us from getting our license to be able to start working in hospitals or other clinics, as its typically a requirement to be hired, Arnold said.