Why entry-level jobs are getting harder to land
The job market for people just starting out has gotten strange. Not because there are no jobs, but because the first rung of the ladder sits higher than it used to. If you graduated in the last couple of years and the search felt brutal, the numbers are on your side.
The pattern behind the frustration
Economists at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab went through payroll records from ADP, which handles pay for millions of American workers, and found that people aged 22 to 25 in the jobs most exposed to AI have seen their employment fall about 16% since late 2022. For young software developers specifically, it’s closer to 20% off the peak. Older workers in the same fields kept adding headcount over the same stretch.
The team, led by Erik Brynjolfsson, called young workers the “canaries in the coal mine,” the first to feel a change that barely shows up in the economy-wide totals yet. I’d add one caveat they’re careful about themselves: that paper is still a working draft, not peer-reviewed, and pinning the drop cleanly on AI is hard when interest rates and a post-pandemic hiring hangover are pushing in the same direction. But the pattern holds across enough firms and roles that it’s tough to wave away.
The rung didn’t vanish, it moved up
The more useful way to read this is that the work itself is changing. PwC studied more than a billion job ads for its 2026 barometer and found that entry-level roles in AI-exposed fields are now seven times more likely to ask for skills that used to belong to experienced people: judgment, leadership, owning a problem that doesn’t have a clean answer. They call it the “seniorization” of entry-level work. Postings for these tougher junior roles grew 35% since 2019, while ordinary entry-level listings in the same industries shrank about 10%.
So the routine tasks that used to fill a new hire’s first year, the work you learned on while still being a little useful, increasingly get handled by software. What’s left on a junior’s plate skews toward the harder parts: checking the machine’s output, talking to a customer, making the call when the answer isn’t obvious. That’s a real disadvantage if you’re the one who hasn’t built those muscles yet.
Not every company is cutting
It’s worth noticing who’s going the other way. IBM’s chief HR officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, described the shift about as bluntly as anyone: “The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them.” Her conclusion wasn’t to stop hiring juniors, though. IBM said it’s tripling entry-level hiring in the US for 2026 and redrawing those roles so new people spend less time on routine work and more with customers and messy problems. Her argument is that companies gutting their junior ranks for a quick productivity bump will regret it in a few years, when nobody in the building is seasoned enough to promote.
That reads as the smarter bet to me. Someone has to become the senior who supervises all of this, and you don’t get there without starting somewhere.
It’s not all AI
Before blaming everything on the models, it helps to hear from the people watching the hiring data. LinkedIn’s chief operating officer, Dan Shapero, said flatly in early 2026 that AI “is not the source of a slow hiring market, but it is changing where opportunities and jobs are forming.” Hiring has been running roughly a fifth below its pre-pandemic pace, and most of that has more to do with interest rates and the comedown from the 2021 hiring frenzy than with any chatbot. AI is reshaping which roles exist and what they demand, but a good chunk of the thin market you’re feeling is just the economy being slow.
What it means if you’re job hunting
If the first rung now asks for judgment, the way to compete is to show judgment rather than lean on a credential. A few things follow from that.
A degree or certificate buys fewer free passes than it did. Employers are reading for what you can actually do, and LinkedIn projects that by 2030 most new roles won’t require a four-year degree at all. That cuts both ways: less protection from the diploma, more room to prove yourself with evidence.
The parts of the job AI handles badly are the parts to lean into. PwC found the new tasks being added to AI-exposed roles are about 2.5 times more likely to need empathy, judgment, and creativity than the tasks they replace. Owning an ambiguous problem, explaining your reasoning, working well with people: those are getting more valuable, not less.
And a lot of this now gets settled in the interview. If a company is hiring a junior specifically to exercise judgment, they’ll probe for it, usually by asking you to talk through something messy you handled and pushing on the parts you gloss over. That’s a skill, and like any skill it responds to practice against something that actually pushes back instead of nodding along.
The honest read
The entry-level market is harder, and the bar has shifted toward skills that used to take years to build. It’s fair to be frustrated by that. But the same shift is why a candidate who can show judgment early stands out more than they would have five years ago. The distance between an average applicant and a sharp one is wider now, and that’s the part you can do something about.