Over the past two years, the slowdown in early-career hiring has been widely attributed to artificial intelligence.
While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of office jobs for entry-level workers, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he is already seeing a “slowdown in hiring” for junior positions and internships.
But two researchers say companies may be hiring fewer younger workers because remote work makes it harder to supervise and train them.
Peter John Lambert, a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, and Yannick Schindler, a senior research economist at the Ellison Institute of Technology, analyzed Revelio Labs CV data covering 243 million new hires and Lightcast data covering 407 million job offers in the US, UK, Canada and Australia from 2017 to 2025.
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Their conclusion: exposure to work from home was a much stronger predictor of weaker hiring of young workers than exposure to generative AI.
“Our results clearly indicate that exposure to remote work is a better predictor of decline in relative employment among early-career individuals,” the authors wrote.
The effect of remote work
The article challenges a growing body of research suggesting that ChatGPT and similar AI tools are replacing young workers.
The authors concluded that previous research may have confused two overlapping trends. The professions most at risk of being impacted by AI – including programmers, consultants, accountants and data analysts – are also the ones most frequently performed remotely.
When researchers analyzed the impact of AI and the impact of remote work separately, both factors appeared to be associated with lower junior hiring. However, when both were controlled for simultaneously, the impact of AI “weakened significantly and often became statistically indistinguishable from zero,” while the impact of remote work remained clear.
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The study suggests that the problem may be organizational rather than technological.
“Remote work has been shown to increase the costs of supervising and monitoring employees and may slow down on-the-job learning,” the researchers wrote. “These organizational difficulties may undermine the profitability of investing in young talents.”
However, AI continues to change the nature of entry-level work. Companies are increasingly using tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to automate simple, routine tasks traditionally assigned to juniors, which means that some young employees are given more advanced responsibilities more quickly.
Pressure on juniors
The shift to remote work appears to be changing the way knowledge workers are hired. Researchers estimate that by 2025, professions with high exposure to remote work will see a decline in the hiring of juniors by 4-5 percentage points. than professions less friendly to remote work.
This trend is already visible in US federal data. The unemployment rate among fresh university graduates was 5.7 percent. in the first quarter, compared with 4.2 percent for all employees – according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The study also showed that after 2022, hiring for junior positions dropped sharply in all four countries analyzed, with the number of such hirings falling by 29% in the US. lower than before the pandemic.
The authors added that this does not mean that AI will not ultimately disrupt the labor market. They believe it may simply be too early to say that AI is already replacing large numbers of younger workers.
“If, as our results indicate, remote work reduces the incentive to hire young talent,” the report concludes, “companies may need to rethink how they train and manage young workers in a hybrid work environment.”
The above text is a translation from American edition of Business Insider
