- LinkedIn Leader Says AI Adoption Doesn’t Affect Hiring Too Much
- But the worst could be yet to come
- Separate research claims that Gen Z is increasingly seeking “poly employment” by working in multiple part-time positions instead of just one full-time job.
A senior LinkedIn executive has pushed back against widely held claims that AI adoption will lead to fewer hirings – despite evidence from the company that appears to contradict this.
Speaking at the Semafor Global Economy Summit (via TechCrunch), Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s director of global affairs and head of legal, said the company’s data shows a 20% drop in hiring since 2022, but denied that AI was the cause.
“At LinkedIn…we have an economic graph that has over a billion members. We have companies, we have jobs, we have skills,” Lawitt noted, “it’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the job market. And we looked – because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We looked and, honestly, we didn’t see it.”
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Hiring is down – for now
Instead of AI being the culprit, Lawit suggested that the recent rise in interest rates was to blame for falling hiring rates.
“We haven’t seen the kinds of impacts that you would expect in the areas that everyone is talking about AI,” he noted, like industries, whether or not it’s customer support, administration or marketing – all those places where if we saw impacts [from] AI, that’s where it would be… Yes, hiring is down, but not more.”
Young adults are expected to be hit much harder by the impact of AI in the workplace, with the technology expected to take over many of the low-level tasks associated with entry-level jobs.
However, Lawitt again asserted that LinkedIn’s data did not show any sort of decline, but urged caution, noting that “(this) doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future, just not yet.”
Lawit’s claims are slightly at odds with recent research that finds younger Gen Z workers are actually abandoning full-time jobs for a mix of part-time roles.
New research from The Deputy claims that “polyemployment” – working multiple jobs simultaneously – has reached a new high, with Generation Z leading the way, making up more than half (55%) of those engaged in the practice.
“AI does not replace the shift economy; it fuels it,” said Silvija Martincevic, CEO of Representative. “This is already helping frontline teams work faster and more efficiently. But many workers still have no idea how technology is deployed around them. This gap, between what AI does and what workers understand, is the defining challenge of this next phase of workforce transformation. The companies that take this seriously and engage their employees rather than leaving them in the dark are the ones who will truly keep their best people.”
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