Change in the way unemployment is calculated in the US? In the last 8 years has their been a change in the way unemployment is calculated? Is there a nuance that has changed in the polling info? Many of my right wing comrades claim the Obama administration has changed the calculation in some way to make it seem as though the number is lower than what it should be?
The most likely explanation for discrepancies that political partisans like to pick at is that presidents like to cite different measures of unemployment. The BLS has 6 alternative categories of labor under-utilization. The U-6 measure of unemployment with seasonal adjustment stands at 9.7%. Although the official rate may be under 5% as in the BLS's September 2016 release here, many people may not feel like the economy is much better, and partisans can argue over which measure of employment or labor force participation rate is most useful.

Most politicians are not part of insidious, cynical political schemes, as the media may make them out to be. Just that when incidents happen, we hear about it non-stop, and it reinforces the public's view that political workers are untrustworthy as a whole, allowing for weird specious claims from the left and right. Take your friends' words with a grain of salt, and when you hear any president make a claim about the unemployment rate, you can look up the BLS's numbers yourselves and see how they are measured and which one the president is citing.

It is also worth noting that the BLS regularly updates how they measure unemployment.