Young job seekers are blaming their vanishing prospects on AI. Older employees are quietly absorbing their roles instead
Westend61 / Getty Images
Ask why a recent graduate can't land a job this year, and you'll hear the same answer almost everywhere. Artificial intelligence ate the entry-level position, the thinking goes, because chatbots now draft the memos, write the code, and design the ads that junior employees once learned on, and those roles simply aren't coming back. It's a tidy explanation. It's also incomplete.
The entry-level crunch itself is real, but the mechanism behind it looks less like robots replacing new graduates and more like older, more experienced workers reclaiming jobs that used to belong to someone younger and cheaper. Workers who lost the roles they expected haven't left the workforce so much as slid into the ones meant for people half their age.
Aaron Terrazas, Glassdoor's former chief economist, raised this possibility in a recent examination of the white-collar labor crisis. "It might not be that AI is taking new grad jobs," he said, "as much as workers with (more) experience taking new grad jobs."
While job postings for junior roles declined 7% between August 2024 and August 2025, according to Indeed's data portal, they also fell in lockstep with the overall market, which contracted 7% over the same period of time. Reductions hit every experience level at close to the same pace. "The challenge for new graduates is not that junior roles are being uniquely squeezed out," Allison Shrivastava wrote for Hiring Lab, "but that the entire market is shrinking, leaving fewer openings to pursue."
Yale's Budget Lab reached a similar conclusion with different data. The overall mix of jobs in the economy has shifted only slightly faster since ChatGPT's release than it did during the early internet era, according to Budget Lab, and the share of workers in the most AI-exposed occupations has held flat at about 18% of the workforce. "While anxiety over the effects of AI on today's labor market is widespread," Martha Gimbel, Molly Kinder, Joshua Kendall, and Maddie Lee wrote, "our data suggests it remains largely speculative."
Still, a working paper from Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, led by economist Erik Brynjolfsson, documented a 16% relative decline in employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in the occupations most exposed to AI, even after accounting for firm-level shocks. Older workers in those same occupations didn't see that drop. Employment in the jobs themselves kept growing, and workers with more experience gained ground in them.
The Hiring Lab also found that the share of U.S. tech postings that require at least five years of experience rose from 37% to 42% between the second quarters of 2022 and 2025. Over the same stretch, mid-level postings with calls for two to four years of experience fell from 46% to 40%. Entry-level postings — open to candidates with a year of experience or less — held steady at about 18%.
So the squeeze is hitting the middle hardest. Employers have raised their experience requirements for mid-tier jobs and pushed senior workers further down the chain.
Even if a senior hire costs more per hour, they need less ramp-up time and carry less hiring risk. That matters for companies already nervous about headcount. And it shows up in who gets an interview.
The wage data tells a consistent story. The pay premium for job switchers fell to 3.7% in May, down from 4.3% in December, according to the Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker. When workers who change jobs gain little more than workers who stay put, people are more likely to make lateral moves or accept lesser roles.
Posting counts measure whether a job exists, not who actually gets it. A new-grad listing can survive in Indeed's tally even as the odds of landing it get worse, because the same posting now draws applicants who already have five years of experience on their résumé.
When experienced workers slide into roles meant for recent graduates, they reset the floor, bringing credentials, networks, and references that a 22-year-old can't match. The Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute documented that 52% of graduates are underemployed within a year of finishing college, and that the condition sticks. A graduate who starts underemployed has a 73% chance of remaining so a decade later. That first job shapes the trajectory of everything that follows.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
