Earlier this year, we brought a group of senior talent acquisition leaders together in Oslo to discuss what AI was actually changing in recruitment and the wider workforce. Among the predictions around the table, an interesting one came up: there will be fewer junior roles. The reasoning was relatively straightforward. AI is becoming increasingly capable of doing the kind of work that has traditionally sat at the bottom of the experience ladder, such as first drafts, basic research and analysis, documentation, sourcing, simple coding tasks and other execution-heavy work that juniors would typically take on while learning everything else.

At the time, it was a prediction based largely on what these leaders were beginning to see inside their own organizations. Looking at the hiring market now, it is becoming harder to dismiss. Unemployment among young people has risen sharply in Norway, and data from LinkedIn suggests entry-level hiring is under pressure among some of the world's largest employers too.

None of this proves that AI is causing the decline in junior hiring. There are too many other factors affecting the labour market to make that claim. But taken together, the signals raise a question that is becoming increasingly difficult for employers to ignore. What happens to the first rung of the career ladder when technology can already do much of the work we used to learn on it?

The bar has moved, not disappeared

Junior hiring has always required a degree of patience. Companies hire people who cannot fully do the job yet because learning on the job is part of how people become good at it. A junior employee starts with simpler tasks, works alongside more experienced colleagues, gets things wrong, receives feedback and gradually takes on more responsibility. There is an obvious cost to that model in the form of slower initial output, more supervision and longer ramp-up times, but companies have traditionally accepted that cost because developing inexperienced talent is how you create experienced talent.

AI changes some of that calculation. When an experienced employee can use AI to research faster, produce a first draft in minutes, automate administrative work or get a significant head start on analysis, the amount of work a smaller team can produce increases. Particularly in companies under pressure to improve efficiency, the economics of hiring someone who needs significant time and supervision to develop start to look different. Why add two junior employees when one experienced employee, equipped with the right tools, might be able to produce the same output?

We are beginning to see signs of that shift in our own recruitment work. Candidates with fewer than three years of experience made up roughly 21% of our placements in 2022. By 2024, that had fallen to around 9%, and since then junior candidates have accounted for roughly 8–14% of placements each quarter. The numbers fluctuate, as placement data naturally does, but they have not returned to anything close to the 2022 level.

That does not necessarily mean junior candidates have become less capable than they were four years ago. A more plausible interpretation is that the threshold for what companies consider “ready” has moved.

The same pressure is showing up elsewhere

Our placement data is only one relatively small window into the labour market, so it becomes more interesting when viewed alongside what is happening elsewhere. In Norway, unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds averaged 14% in 2025, up from 12.1% the year before, and reached 14.5% in the final quarter. By November, SSB described youth unemployment as the highest measured in 20 years, with the exception of three months during the pandemic. Overall unemployment, by comparison, stood at 4.5% for the year. Sweden was seeing a similar pattern, with youth unemployment reaching 24.9% in November 2025.

There are many reasons why young people experience higher unemployment than the broader workforce, and it would be far too simplistic to draw a straight line from those numbers to AI. Economic conditions, education, labour-force participation and employers' general appetite for risk all play a role. But hiring data from the US points to a broader shift in how experience is being valued.

LinkedIn's Economic Graph data showed entry-level hiring in the US falling 6% between December 2025 and February 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. Among the 50 companies on LinkedIn's list of top US employers for 2026, entry-level hires as a share of total hiring fell from 40.3% in 2016 to 37.2% in 2025, while the median experience level of employees at those companies increased from around six years to nearly eight and a half over the same period.

These are different datasets measuring different things, so they should not be treated as proof of a single cause. What they do show, however, is a similar direction of travel across markets: younger and less experienced workers are facing a tougher entry point, while employers appear increasingly willing to prioritize experience. AI is unlikely to be the sole explanation, but it may be accelerating a shift that was already underway.

Juniors aren't only competing with other juniors anymore

This is perhaps where AI changes the equation most significantly. A junior candidate is no longer only competing against other junior candidates for an entry-level role. In some cases, they are effectively competing against the economics of hiring a more experienced person who can use AI to produce significantly more than they could a few years ago.

That does not mean junior employees have nothing valuable to contribute, nor does it mean every company can simply replace junior capacity with a senior employee and a ChatGPT subscription. Experience remains expensive, senior employees have limited capacity, and organizations still need people at different stages of their careers. But when budgets are tight and productivity expectations are rising, hiring fewer, more experienced people can become an increasingly rational short-term decision.

The problem is what happens when that decision is repeated across an entire labour market. If companies become structurally less willing to create roles in which inexperienced people can learn, we are not simply reducing the number of junior jobs available today. We are narrowing the route through which people become the experienced candidates everyone wants to hire tomorrow.

We've been here before, but not quite like this

Technological disruptions have repeatedly eliminated tasks and transformed professions, only for new industries, specialisms and job titles to emerge in their place. Many of the roles people hold today barely existed fifteen years ago, and there is little reason to think AI will be different in that respect.

What history does not guarantee is that those new roles emerge at the same pace as existing opportunities disappear, in the same companies, or for the same people whose work is being transformed. It also does not answer the more immediate question facing someone entering the labour market now: if the traditional route towards gaining experience is becoming narrower, what replaces it?

The interesting question, then, is not simply whether AI will create new jobs, because it will. The question is how people become qualified for them.

Maybe “junior” needs a new definition

The answer is probably not to preserve junior roles exactly as they existed before generative AI. If a tool can reliably complete parts of the work faster and better, asking people to spend years doing those tasks manually purely because previous generations did so would make little sense. Instead, companies may need to rethink what an entry-level role is actually designed to achieve.

That means asking different questions about development. What should someone already know when they arrive, and what should they be expected to learn on the job? Which tasks should AI accelerate, and which are worth doing manually because the process itself develops judgement? How do we give junior employees enough responsibility to learn without pretending the technology does not exist? And what does good management look like when the junior employee, the senior employee and the manager all have access to many of the same tools?

Most importantly, we may need to reconsider what we mean when we say someone is “junior ready”. Pulling back from junior hiring can be a perfectly defensible decision for an individual company right now, particularly when efficiency is the priority. But workforce planning cannot only be about the people an organization needs this year.

The companies that figure out how to develop inexperienced talent in an AI-augmented workplace, rather than simply using AI to remove inexperienced work, may eventually find themselves with something their competitors struggle to buy: a pipeline of people who have learned how to combine technology with the judgement, context and experience that technology cannot simply generate for them.

The junior role probably isn't dead, but the old version of it might be. And if that's where we're heading, the challenge for HR and TA is no longer simply deciding whether to keep hiring juniors the way we always have. It's figuring out what the first rung of the career ladder should look like now.

Rethinking what your team needs next?

As roles change, so does what good hiring looks like. Whether you're reconsidering the experience you actually need, building a team around new capabilities, or trying to make sense of where AI fits into your workforce, we're always up for comparing notes.