Dive Brief:

• Rates of hiring are down in more than a dozen countries, with most showing a 15% to 25% drop from last year, according to LinkedIn’s Nov. 1 Global Talent Trends report. Yet, job seekers are looking for positions at a greater fervor than last year. In the U.S., candidates are applying to jobs at an 18% higher rate than the previous year, per the report.
• Those job postings that mention generative artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence have seen a 17% increase in interest in the past two years, the report found.
• “As for the popularity of job posts mentioning AI, candidates are savvy,” Erin Scruggs, vice president of global talent acquisition at LinkedIn, said in the report. “They’re showing they want to go where opportunities are.”

Dive Insight:

The demand for candidates with skills in generative artificial intelligence has skyrocketed in just the past year. Only 519 job postings mentioned generative AI in 2022, compared to 10,113 through mid-October, an 1,848% increase, according to a report by labor analytics firm Lightcast. There were more than 385,000 job listings that mentioned any kind of artificial intelligence this year.

Demand for AI skills also is driving up salaries for workers in those fields. The average salary for an AI engineer climbed 12% in the last quarter alone, according to an analysis by tech salaries tracker Comprehensive.io. That puts the average salary for AI engineers around $188,000, 21% higher than non-AI software engineers, the organization said.

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