- LinkedIn leader says AI adoption isn’t affecting hiring too much
- However worse may be to come
- Separate research claims Gen Z are increasingly seeking “poly-employment” working several part-time roles instead of a single full-time one
A senior LinkedIn executive has pushed back against widely-reported claims AI adoption is leading to a drop in hiring – despite company evidence apparently contradicting this.
Speaking at the Semafor World Economy summit (via TechCrunch), Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s chief global affairs and legal officer, said the company’s data shows a 20% decline in hiring since 2022, but denied AI was to blame.
“At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills,” Lawit noted, “it’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor 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 the culprit, Lawit suggested a recent rise in interest rates was to blame for the fall hiring rates.
“We have not seen the sort of impacts that you would expect to see in areas that everyone is talking about AI,” he noted, like industries, whether or not it’s customer support, or administrative, or marketing — all these places that if we were seeing impacts [from] AI that’s where it would be…Yes, hiring’s down, but not down more.”
Younger adults are expected to be hit much harder by the impact of AI in the workplace, with the technology set to take over many of the low-level tasks associated with entry jobs.
However Lawit again claimed LinkedIn’s data was not showing any kind of decline, but urged caution, noting, “(it) doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen in the future, but not yet.”
Lawit’s claims clash slightly with recent research claiming younger Gen Z workers are in fact shunning full-time jobs for a combination of part-time roles.
A new study from Deputy claims “poly-employment” – working multiple jobs simultaneously – has hit a new high, with Gen Z leading the way, composing more than half (55%) of those engaged in the practice.
“AI is not replacing the shift work economy; it is fueling it,” said Silvija Martincevic, CEO of Deputy. “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 is doing and what workers understand, is the defining challenge of this next phase of workforce transformation. The companies that take that seriously, and bring their workers along rather than leave them in the dark, are the ones that will actually keep their best people.”
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