- LinkedIn Leader Says AI Adoption Isn’t Impacting Hiring Too Much
- No matter how much worse is to come
- Separate research claims that Generation Z is increasingly seeking “multi-employment” by working in multiple part-time roles rather than just one full-time role.
A senior LinkedIn executive has rejected widely reported claims that AI adoption is causing a slump in hiring, despite the company’s evidence apparently contradicting this.
Speaking at the Semafor World Economy Summit (via TechCrunch), Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s global affairs and legal director, said the company’s data shows a 20% decline in hiring since 2022, but denied that AI was to blame.
“On LinkedIn… we have an economic graph that has over a billion members. We have companies, we have jobs, we have skills,” Lawit said, “it’s really an incredible real-time view of what’s happening in the job market. And we’ve looked, because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We’ve looked and, honestly, we haven’t seen it.”
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Hiring is down, for now
Instead of AI being to blame, Lawit suggested that a recent rise in interest rates was to blame for falling hiring rates.
“We haven’t seen the kind of impacts that you would expect to see in areas where everyone is talking about AI,” he said, such as industries, whether it’s customer service, administration or marketing, all of these places where if we were seeing impacts [from] “AI that’s where it would be… Yes, hiring is down, but not any more.”
Younger adults are expected to be much more affected by the impact of AI in the workplace, as the technology will take over many of the low-level tasks associated with entry-level jobs.
However, Lawit again stated that LinkedIn data did not show any type of decline, but urged caution, noting that “it doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future, but not yet.”
Lawit’s claims clash slightly with recent research claiming that younger Gen Z workers are, in fact, eschewing full-time jobs for a mix of part-time roles.
A new study from Vice claims that “polyemployment” (working multiple jobs simultaneously) has reached a new record, with Generation Z leading the way, representing more than half (55%) of those who engage in this practice.
“AI isn’t replacing the gig economy; it’s driving it,” said Silvija Martincevic, CEO of Vice. “It’s already helping frontline teams work faster and more efficiently. But many workers still have no idea how the technology is being deployed around them. That 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 workers rather than leaving them in the dark are the ones that will truly keep their best people.”
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