Early career hiring is down – labor market data shows it has been plummeting since 2022.

The CEOs of the two most influential AI companies – OpenAI and Anthropic – have put the blame at AI’s door.

They’ve spent years openly warning that AI will eliminate entry level roles because the very tasks that are central to current early career roles are the same ones being mastered and automated by AI.

Now, both executives have started to walk back these warnings. In fact, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman openly said the AI ‘jobs apocalypse’ for entry level work he predicted probably won’t happen.

AI expert and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick stated that the link between junior hiring decline and AI “is not yet established.”

New research from the London School of Economics supports the argument that AI is, in fact, not the biggest threat to entry level work.

Studying 407 million online job postings and 243 million new hire data points across the UK, US, Canada and Australia between 2017 and 2025, LSE researchers Peter John Lambert & Yannick Schindler concluded that working from home was “a better predictor of the decline in relative early-career hiring.”

Clearly, the early career challenge is an organizational one, not a technology one.

If AI is not actually the biggest threat to entry level work, and remote working is, HR needs a drastic rethink and redesign of early career approaches.

Where should they start? UNLEASH explores.

‘Treat early careers as an investment’: Be intentional when building successful talent pipelines

Hybrid working did not bring the end of entry level work, but “it exposed how much we relied on informal learning and apprenticeship to develop it,” Ashutosh Garg, Cofounder and CEO at Eightfold AI, tells UNLEASH.

Garg continues: “A lot of early-career growth comes from everyday moments: hearing how decisions get made, getting quick feedback after a meeting, or watching someone experienced handle a difficult situation.

“Those learning moments don’t happen as naturally in distributed environments.”

The solution is not to cut down on early career talent, or to simply to call everyone – entry level workers included – back to the office five days a week.

Instead, the onus is on leaders to “create the conditions for talent to thrive,” notes Sarah Tilley, SVP, Global Talent Management & Acquisition at ServiceNow.

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