Due to how capitalists define recessions (not that they do so consistently when it's inconvenient), you could have pretty large unemployment but enough growth to avoid them calling it a recession. By a lot of reasonable folks' logic, unemployment is already kept high on purpose even during "boom" years, the furthest from recession. The same capitalist economists that engineer these things are deathly afraid of full employment as well and based this on, more or less, speculative bullshit.

The field of economics is mostly shit, they are mostly focused on keeping the wheels spinning in just the right way to optimize in the interest of profits over different timescales, including at worker expense. It's less about how to make the economy work in general and more how to keep it still working for business owners when thr whole thing implodes every 8-15 years.