Is AI Taking Entry-Level Jobs? What the 2026 Data Actually Shows
Trying to understand the labour market isn't easy. It's been a while since I last wrote about how technology is going to affect workers. From predictions that the middle manager's days are numbered, to the frozen labour market, the pendulum seems to swing back and forth without pause.
So when I set out once again to hunt down what's actually going on, I was met with contradictions.
The giants are hiring again. Or are they?
It was an article in the Wall Street Journal that caught my attention. "Big Companies Are Starting to Hire Again, Defying Predictions of AI Wipeout."
The piece looked at how companies that previously cut positions because of AI now find themselves having to hire again. And it's entry-level positions in particular they're looking to fill.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Sarah Franklin, CEO of the HR platform Lattice, says the need for junior talent with good AI know-how is considerable.
"What you have now is a realisation that you need the AI-native skills. You need this [entry-level] workforce, which is innovative, not calcified in thought. They’re also more affordable because they are newer to the workforce." – Sarah Franklin to WSJ.
This breaks with everything we've heard and read about the labour market over the past few months. When the story came out, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits in the US was also the lowest since 1969. Even Alphabet, and Google with it, say they'll carry on hiring – especially people with skills in AI and cloud services.
We also expect to continue hiring in key investment areas such as AI and Cloud, and we are investing in marketing to support our AI products. – Ashkenazi during Google's quarterly report in July.
Getting people back into the offices might not be a daft idea. AI tools have turned out to be very expensive, and not good enough. Uber burned through its entire AI budget in just four months. That led to a reckoning in which COO Andrew Macdonald is asking whether the AI tools are worth the money.
Jake Angelo
But only a few days after the WSJ article, I saw another narrative. Last Friday the figures arrived, showing that the American labour market is once again losing more jobs than it creates. This time with the New York Times as the messenger.
The AI hype is over
In particular, fewer people are quitting their jobs, and companies – especially in the tech sector – aren't hiring. But it's worth remembering that we're comparing with 2021 and 2022, a time when tech companies around the world were hiring like there was no tomorrow. Over those years, the (home) offices were filled with enough staff for a whole decade. It had to stop at some point.
It’s a sharp reversal from what we’ve seen in the past. It’s also coming at a time when there’s an incredible amount of hype in the tech industry around data centers, and it’s just not showing up in the employment numbers. – Daniel Zhao, chief economist at the jobs platform Glassdoor, to the NYT.
I think the market we're seeing now is still frozen, as it has been since early 2025. Wage growth over the past year is at its lowest level since 2021. That's what happens when few people change jobs, many are applying, and companies hire fewer than they used to. That kind of negotiating climate hits hard when workers sit down to talk compensation packages.
What about Norway?
Throughout 2026 we've been reading about young workers struggling to find a job. They send hundreds of applications without a single call-in. On the other side you've got the employers, drowning in AI-generated applications. The volume has gone up, because language models have lowered the threshold for applying.
Merethe Fjørtoft Åsenhus, who heads the recruitment network at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, tells Khrono, a Norwegian higher education news site, that they're receiving "a tidal wave of AI slop".
— It tends to be the English-language PhD positions where we get huge numbers of applicants. And we can see that a lot of them are alike and written in English. It's obvious that AI engines have been used. Other times it's hard to know whether the applicants are real, or whether it's just machines applying, Åsenhus tells Khrono.
NTNU isn't alone in seeing applicant numbers climb. For the second year running I gave Arendalsuka – Norway's big annual politics-and-industry gathering – a miss. But new this year: I dropped by the mini version in Oslo, Arendalsgata! I heard careers advisers and recruiters discuss AI-generated applications filling up the pile. The texts are impersonal and slide straight past the eyes of whoever's reading them.
Artificial intelligence has wrecked the job-hunting market, but not in the way we thought it would. According to an article on forskning.no, the Norwegian science news site, it isn't AI's fault that young workers are struggling to get into the labour market.
– We found no solid evidence that artificial intelligence has displaced young workers in occupations that are especially exposed to that kind of impact, says Roberto Iacono, professor of economics at NTNU's Department of Social Work, to Forskning.
Desperate applicants nothing new
In May, the property firm Malling & Co reported that they'd had over 500 applicants for a single position, and it's now normal to get anywhere between 150 and 250 applicants for an advertised job.
Job hunting as a graduate is a slog. A lack of experience is often given as the reason for the rejection. At the same time, recruiters agree that cranking up the volume of applications sent is the wrong medicine.
In a world where "everyone" uses Claude to write an application, your own words have become a scarce commodity. Use your own voice, is the clear advice from experts. But there are also those who go their own way:
Suz Bannister is the founder of Riser. She believes the CV and the job application will be gone by 2030, and that a LinkedIn profile and other social channels ought to be CV enough. Through Riser you can upload a short video pitch of yourself and let an AI algorithm match you with relevant jobs.
The CV is a fact sheet, so that can live as a profile. – Suz Bannister, CEO of Rise, to The Times.
Where the written application has long given an advantage to those who can write, I fear video pitches will hand the advantage to those with charisma. If nothing else, the face-fits factor comes into play, in a world where we all risk becoming actors at an audition.
The company Drinksult took it a step further. They're currently running a recruitment round for a new social media manager. No CV or application needed, but you have to comment "Sultyhire" in the comments to get the job ad sent to you. After that you have to post a video on social media yourself about why YOU should get the job.
Last week I confidently wrote that I hadn't missed a thing with two months off social media. Maybe the dream job slipped away.
But if it means I have to subject myself to making a reel or a TikTok, I'll pass.