Where did all the entry-level jobs go? (With Revelio CEO Ben Zweig)
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today I want to talk about jobs. There are lots of worrying headlines about the job markets. We've heard about big layoffs at firms like Amazon and other companies going into hiring freezes like Walmart. We've heard that entry-level jobs are under pressure from AI that the amount of graduate hiring there is, is going down. So what should we make of this? Is this artificial intelligence and its early effects on human work? Or is AI just a convenient excuse for bosses looking to manage their costs? To explore this, I've asked Ben Zweig of Revelio Labs to join me. He is one of the more thoughtful founders and thinkers on the topic of the labour market. And in this moment in time when the BLS, the Bureau of Labour Statistics, has gone dark and become unreliable, Ben's work at Revelio Labs is providing a private sector take on what's happening in the job market at
large. So Ben, I hope you're going to be able to bring some clarity to this confusion and join me as we jointly explore what's happening to the world of work. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's get started with what the headlines say. You know, the headlines for a decade have talked about the threat of automation to the world of work. I think it's now been 12 years since my friend Carl Frey and his collaborator Michael Osborne published that famous paper about the way in which machine learning might affect human tasks. And as we move into 2025, we are starting to hear stories. The entry-level job market in particular seems to be collapsing. When you look across your data at Revelio and give us a moment to understand what data Revelio looks at and gathers, what is the most accurate description of what's happening in the labor market?
I think you're largely right that the job market is not very good right now. So hiring is at a low. Also, attrition is at a low. So people are not leaving jobs as much, even despite increases in layoffs. But, you know, separations from jobs, you know, are not happening to the same degree as they used to be. And that is particularly affecting young workers. But what's interesting about this is I think you kind of touched upon this idea Brynjolfsson paper, you know, and others out of Stanford that highlight that there is an interaction between entry-level workers and AI exposure. And that's research that we've done at Revelio as well early on. But I think, you know, the researchers have gone a little deeper into it.
And I think it is credible that AI seems to be affecting entry-level work. But notably, it's not causing technological unemployment like was predicted by Osborne and Frey or was predicted 100 years ago from John Maynard Keynes. You know, in 1930, he wrote, you know, economic possibilities for our grandchildren and predicted in 100 years we'd all be working two day work weeks. I think it was 15 hours. So it was a 15 hour, 15 hour week. It hasn't quite been 100 years, so maybe in 2030 we'll see that he's right, but it doesn't look like he'll be right. So we're not seeing technological unemployment, but we are seeing decreases in demand for entry-level workers, and that is particularly concentrated among AI-exposed roles.
I think you could say, oh, well, you know, AI, you know, seems to be affecting the execution of tasks, which, you know, young people do and rather than the orchestration, which favors more senior workers, people with experience in management, because, you know, in the age of generative AI, we're essentially managing these bots to go and to go and do things and execute on some subtasks. And I think that that is a read. Personally, I think I'm not quite sold on that yet because we're not seeing so much substitution. Like we're not seeing enough substitution that you would think would result if that were the main effect. I think what we're also seeing and what's conflating this result a little bit is that there's a lot of uncertainty in the labor market, partially due to AI, partially due to policy.
But I think as a result, employers have a kind of high discount rate.
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