WFH is a bigger driver of entry-level job woes than AI, researchers say

• AI has often been blamed for a slowdown in junior recruiting.
• Two researchers said remote work may be slowing entry-level hiring more than AI tools.
• They said remote work makes junior employees harder to supervise and train well.

For the past two years, the slowdown in entry-level hiring has been widely blamed on artificial intelligence.

While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he was already seeing “a slowdown in hiring” for junior roles and internships.

But two researchers say companies may actually be hiring fewer junior workers because remote work makes them harder to supervise and train.

Peter John Lambert, a postdoctoral research fellow at the London School of Economics, and Yannick Schindler, a senior research economist at the Ellison Institute of Technology, analyzed Revelio Labs résumé data covering 243 million new hires and Lightcast data covering 407 million job postings across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia between 2017 and 2025.

Their conclusion: work-from-home exposure was a much stronger predictor of weaker junior hiring than generative AI exposure.

“Our findings point strongly towards WFH exposure as a better predictor of the decline in relative early-career hiring,” the authors wrote.

The WFH effect

The paper challenges a growing body of research suggesting ChatGPT and similar AI tools are replacing young workers.

The authors said those studies may have confused two overlapping trends. Jobs most exposed to AI — including software developers, consultants, accountants, and data scientists — are also the jobs most likely to be done remotely.

When the researchers analyzed AI exposure and remote-work exposure separately, both appeared linked to weaker junior hiring. But when they controlled for both at the same time, the AI effect “attenuated heavily and often became statistically indistinguishable from zero,” while the work-from-home effect remained robust.

The paper suggests the issue may be organizational rather than technological.

“WFH has been shown to raise the cost of supervising and monitoring workers, and can slow on-the-job learning,” the researchers wrote. “These organizational frictions can erode the value-proposition of investing in early-career talent.”

AI is still reshaping entry-level work. Companies are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to automate grunt work traditionally assigned to junior employees, pushing some young workers into higher-level responsibilities earlier in their careers.

The junior squeeze

The shift toward remote work appears to be reshaping white-collar hiring. The researchers estimate that by 2025, occupations with high remote-work exposure saw a 4-to-5 percentage point larger decline in junior hiring than less remote-friendly occupations.

That trend is already showing up in federal data. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.7% in the first quarter, compared with 4.2% for all workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The study also found that entry-level hiring dropped sharply after 2022 across all four countries analyzed, with US entry-level hiring down 29% from pre-pandemic levels.

The authors added that this doesn’t mean AI will not eventually disrupt labor markets. Instead, they said it may simply be too early to conclude AI is already replacing large numbers of junior workers.

“If, as our results indicate, WFH is reducing the incentive to hire junior talent,” the paper concludes, companies may need to rethink how they train and manage young employees in hybrid workplaces.