Hiring down 20% since 2022

LinkedIn says hiring is still about 20% below its 2022 level, and the company says higher interest rates — not artificial intelligence — are driving the slowdown. (techcrunch.com) Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s chief global affairs and legal officer, said at Semafor’s World Economy summit this week that the company’s Economic Graph has not shown the sharper drops you would expect if artificial intelligence were already cutting deeply into customer support, administrative, or marketing jobs. (techcrunch.com) Lawit also said LinkedIn does not see first-job hiring for college-age workers falling faster than hiring for midcareer or later-career workers. He said that could change later, but “not yet.” (techcrunch.com) That matches other recent research. The Budget Lab at Yale said in an October 1, 2025 analysis that measures of artificial-intelligence exposure, automation, and augmentation showed “no sign” of being tied to changes in employment or unemployment across the broader United States labor market. (budgetlab.yale.edu) Yale’s researchers said the economy had not experienced a discernible labor-market disruption in the 33 months after ChatGPT’s November 2022 release, and argued that workplace technology shifts usually take years or decades to spread through hiring and staffing decisions. (budgetlab.yale.edu) LinkedIn’s own January 2026 labor-market report described global hiring as nearly 20% below pre-pandemic levels and said the pressure was concentrated in advanced economies, where hiring remained 20% to 35% below pre-pandemic levels while India and the United Arab Emirates were still growing. (weforum.org) The same LinkedIn data pointed the other way on artificial intelligence demand: the World Economic Forum summary said artificial intelligence had added 1.3 million roles, including more than 600,000 artificial-intelligence-enabled data-center jobs, and that AI engineer was one of LinkedIn’s fastest-growing job titles over the past three years. (weforum.org) The pressure is shifting from job titles to job requirements. LinkedIn said the skills needed for jobs have changed 24% on average globally since 2015, and Lawit said the company now expects that figure to reach 70% by 2030 as artificial intelligence spreads through day-to-day work. (linkedin.github.io) (techcrunch.com) That leaves job seekers in a market where fewer employers are hiring, but employers are still rewriting what they want. LinkedIn’s data says the hiring freeze has been a macroeconomics story so far; the next fight is over who can show changing skills and concrete results fastest. (techcrunch.com)