Companies Want More Entry-Level Workers. They Don’t Want Beginners
Entry-level hiring is poised to grow, but employers increasingly expect first-time workers to arrive with experience, advanced skills, and workplace-ready training.
Entry-level jobs became one of the first casualties of businesses adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools, with many companies no longer needing younger workers to perform tasks increasingly automated by bots. Now evidence suggests recruitment for those lower-level positions is again rising— only now, HR officials want to fill them with candidates who already have considerable work experience to bring to them.
Meet the updated labor market paradox that early-career job seekers have long struggled with. For decades, those younger employment seekers have complained about being turned down for entry-level work because they didn’t have enough experience—the very thing they’d hoped to attain in those first-rung-on-the-ladder roles. Now, new survey data indicates that contradiction has hardened, with 63 percent of hiring manager saying they expect a year or more of workplace activity from candidates applying for openings posted as entry-level.
Nominal entry-level jobs require lots of experience
That’s only the first hurdle for younger applicants revealed in a survey of 400 hiring managers and early-career job seekers by Benedictine University. The finding that 23 percent of HR executives demand at least 12 months of work experience, and 43 percent expect two years of it from candidates seeking entry-level positions was daunting enough on its own.
But in addition, nearly 40 percent of HR managers also said they expect more skills from new entry-level hires than they did five years ago. As such, 39 percent acknowledged the bar for landing what has traditionally been a young person’s first job is significantly higher today than it was half a decade ago.
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“Prior experience has become the norm rather than the exception,” said a Benedictine University report on the rising challenges for early career workers to find entry-level jobs. “The label has drifted away from its plain meaning.”
That’s bad news for younger work seekers, especially with 46 percent of responding executives anticipating their companies will accelerate hiring for entry-level posts over the next two years. But the same AI tools that led to the recent slashing of those openings are also evident in landing those jobs becoming a harder nut to crack.
For example, HR managers cited basic tasks like writing clear email, reports, and other documentation as the top work experience they demanded of candidates at 72 percent. Yet nearly a quarter of those executives also said AI is already automating those same workplace chores—apparently undermining the importance of those skills to jobs being filled.
A related contradiction became clear when 26 percent of responding hiring managers said apps’ abilities to take over repetitive and lower-value work left them “more willing to hire someone with little or no work experience.” Just what is a younger person looking for their first job supposed to conclude from that?
Source: www.inc.com
