How will we have senior people in 5-7 years if we don’t have junior people today?

There’s already a lot of great content out there discussing the implications of AI on the recruiter’s role. There’s no question in my mind that TA leaders will have a hard time justifying headcount for transactional recruiters who aren’t operating as talent advisors, especially as the new tech coming out focuses more and more on hiring manager self-service and not just candidate-facing engagement and recruiter productivity.

Will the business demand for junior roles diminish?

I think another big impact on our roles in recruiting will come from a shift in how CFOs, tech and customer service, and sales business leaders think about the need for junior roles — will we still need junior developers, SDRs, and junior customer service reps? And if we don’t, how does that impact who we recruit, how we recruit, and our big internship, co-op, and university recruiting programs? And how will it impact junior candidates — like my son, who just graduated from university?

At last September’s Head of TA Recruiting Leadership Lab 50 workshop in Seattle, I asked a couple of talented business leaders to talk about how they’re thinking about the impact of AI on their organizations. Specifically, we talked through the likely impact of the size and impact of AI and automation tools on the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of people on their teams. The CTO and Senior Sales Leader expected the positive impact on productivity for engineering and sales roles to significantly increase in the next few years. Both already incorporated a ton of technology into their workflows. I think all of the TA leaders in the room expected to hear that, as we’re experiencing that as well in our TA teams. 

But I wanted to dig into what I was reading and hearing from AI gurus who demonstrated how AI could do the work of junior people. Headlines have been filled with CEOs cutting teams or announcing cuts, with more junior and mid-level roles being the most impacted.

Will AI eliminate the need for many of the junior and entry-level corporate roles we’ve been hiring for forever?

Maybe. Probably. It depends.

There’s no question AI can do some of the work of junior people.

How will companies gain the senior talent… if we don’t have pipelines of junior talent?

Mommy, where do senior people come from?

The insight that stood out to me most from the conversation wasn’t just how cool it’d be to send an AI agent on a task to do something a human used to do, especially if it didn’t really require a human to do it (i.e. find bugs in code or prepare research on a company and sales target for an upcoming sales demo call).

It was this: How will we have senior people in 5-7 years if we don’t have junior people today?

We were aligned that a lot of junior work can be replaced with a mid to senior-level person prompting AI to do the work. We also agreed that the more experienced human could review it to make sure it wasn’t some weird hallucination, unrealistic, or terribly biased.

But if you think beyond the short term and consider how junior people actually become mid and senior-level, it’s typically through hands-on live experiences on the job. Humans learn from doing, from screwing up, from getting feedback from a boss or peers, from getting positive reinforcement, from launching something before it was ready and experiencing the consequences, from losing a sale, from winning the sale, from having the code crash the server, and from experimenting. We learn from doing stuff on the job. And every senior worker was once a junior and then a mid-level worker.

Do we have an investment mentality in developing talent?

If I take a macro look at this, I think about the shift that has happened in my career in talent. When I started in the early ’90s — or the late 20th century, as I like to say 🙂 — the learning and development teams were 3-4x bigger than recruiting (or HR generalists doing recruiting) teams in many big U.S. companies. Companies with recruiting teams largely depended on post-and-pray, big university programs, and headhunters. If the role expectations changed for a class of employees (for example, customer service people needed more selling skills or mid-level managers needed to become more technical), companies would work with L&D teams to train existing employees. There was more of an investment – or build – mentality. Compare that with the last 20 years, where many U.S.-based companies would rather lay off and hire new people than develop their internal talent. (Note: Many other countries like Germany have strong labor unions that make it harder to just swap out internal talent for external hires, so there’s more of a bias or requirement towards build than buy in many other countries.)

“Connect the dots for us here, John!”

We pay a tax when we don’t expose the consequences of talent decisions to the business.

It’s not just AI that can make hiring junior talent harder

OK, so hear me out. I think we risk getting hit with a double whammy around entry-level talent. AI may replace the work that many junior people do today, and many companies already lack strong internal mobility, onboarding, and development-focused programs and culture, which could make hiring junior people even less attractive. Bottom line: How will companies gain the senior talent that hiring managers tell us they want and need if we don’t have pipelines of junior talent coming into our companies with robust programs to help them grow into mid and senior-level workers? Now, add on the classic “hit the ground running” requirement for hiring managers living in a world of cost-cutting and limited headcount, and it may be a perfect storm.

What is the impact on us in TA?

I’m not panicking, but I think this could be big.

When I think about all of the source-of-hire data I’ve reviewed from hundreds of companies, the interviewing practices of thousands of hiring managers, the capacity and skills of recruiters to recruit and close senior talent, and the poor middle managers who are juggling way too much work (and may take on even more with “recruiting self-service” soon), I’m worried.

Do we have what’s needed to hire mostly experienced talent? If we do and hiring managers remain open to hiring 30% junior talent, would those managers even have the capacity and support needed to prioritize potential over short-term performance, especially if the big bosses want to tell Wall Street that the huge AI investments are generating massive ROI and cost-cutting?

TA leaders will have a hard time justifying headcount for transactional recruiters who aren’t operating as talent advisors.

What can we do as talent advisors?

If you’re a TA leader, senior recruiter, or Talent Advisor talking about the talent mix in an exec’s organization, you should absolutely get aligned on the mix of talent by seniority.  What is it today? What does she want it to look like in two years and co-create the plan to get there, together.

If we take the new req orders, “Hire me more senior people; we’re not hiring junior people anymore”—and don’t pause to think through the medium and long-term consequences of that kind of hiring strategy, we may end up competing for fewer and fewer senior people, with very little pipeline of future senior people to draw from.

If the mix of talent changes from 30% to 40% junior talent to just 10% junior talent, the kind of recruiting we do (we need much more segmentation), the average headcount salary placeholders finance asks us to carry over to next year, and the tailored recruiting pitches needed to get senior talent will need a big shift.

We pay a tax when we don’t expose the consequences of talent decisions to the business. We should work to minimize that tax and bring transparency to major shifts in who we hire, as they have a huge impact on how we hire.

What do you think? Are you already seeing execs reduce junior headcount needs, and are you collaborating on the impact of that shift?  I’ll post this article on my personal LinkedIn page, and I would love to hear your comments.  

About The Author

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader with Amazon and Expedia turned consultant. He and his team at Recruiting Toolbox are hired by world-class companies to train hiring managers and recruiters, coach and train TA leaders, and help raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire. If you’re seeking more best practices, check out the free resources for recruiters at TalentAdvisor.com and for recruiting leaders at RecruitingLeadership.com. And if you’re a head of TA from a large company, check out www.RLL50.com for info on our special workshop just for senior recruiting leaders, where we’ll dig into the impact of AI on our TA orgs, redefine the role of the recruiter, and dig into best practices for driving adoption of new tech and role expectations with our recruiters and hiring managers.

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