Crises, regardless of their nature (either financial or medical), have a major, asymmetrical and long-term influence on the business environment, producing significant, complex disruption. Economic resilience means not only recovery, but a remodeling of balances, a "new normal". The paper analyzes the effects of the crises of 2008-09 and 2020-21 on the labor market and economic recovery, starting from the critical analysis of the intervention in crisis management through public policies. The group of selected states (EU-27), although it is part of an integrative structure of development policies and targets, presents significant national differences (level of development, balances on the labor market, structure of the business environment by activities, regional integration through trade, etc.). The analysis focuses on measuring the effects of the crisis on some adjustment factors of development efficiency, namely the unemployment rate, the NEET rate, the job vacancy rate, GDP/capita and trade openness. The obtained results show us the risks and vulnerabilities of the post-crisis economic recovery uncorrelated with social resilience and sustainable development. Support policies are necessary, but they should be appropriate to local characteristics, their partial implementation or the ineffectiveness of the proposed adjustment measures leading to divergent/adverse effects of the allocation of national resources and human capital, to slippages, often irreversible, in capitalizing on the country's comparative advantages for development.