Entry‑level hiring down 16%
Social reporting flagged a sharp employment drop for early‑career engineers—about a 16% decline since 2022—while hires over age 30 rose, a shift that squeezed more than a million potential new hires this year (x.com). That divergence was described as AI compressing volume hiring by replacing routine tasks, tightening the market for fresh grads.
Early-career hiring in tech has fallen sharply since 2022, with new graduates now making up a much smaller share of new hires than before the pandemic. (signalfire.com) SignalFire said on May 20, 2025 that new graduates accounted for just 7% of hires at large tech companies in 2024, down 25% from 2023 and down more than 50% from 2019. At startups, new graduates made up under 6% of hires, down 11% from 2023 and down more than 30% from 2019. (signalfire.com) Outside tech, Gusto forecast that the average May and June 2025 hiring rate for new graduates would be 4.8%, down from 5.8% in 2024 and 8.7% in 2022. That put the Class of 2025 on track for a hiring peak 16% lower than 2024 and 44% lower than 2022. (gusto.com) The pattern is not mainly about layoffs. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said in January 2026 that employment declines for workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations were driven mostly by fewer people moving directly from out of the workforce into jobs. (dallasfed.org) In that Dallas Fed summary of Stanford research, workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations saw employment fall 13% since 2022, while employment for less-exposed or more-experienced workers was steady or rising. The study used payroll data on 25 million workers from Automatic Data Processing and public Census survey data. (dallasfed.org) Hiring has also shifted toward people with more experience. Indeed Hiring Lab reported that by the second quarter of 2025, 42% of tech postings asked for at least five years of experience, up from 37% in the second quarter of 2022. (hiringlab.org) Indeed found that standard and junior tech job postings were down 34% from five years earlier in February 2025, while senior and manager postings were down 19%. Semafor, citing SignalFire, reported that companies were posting lower-level roles and then hiring more experienced workers into them. (hiringlab.org) (semafor.com) Researchers and recruiters do not describe artificial intelligence as the only cause. SignalFire pointed to smaller funding rounds, shrinking teams and fewer formal new-graduate programs, while Indeed said the tech-postings slump began in early 2022, before the artificial-intelligence hiring narrative took over. (signalfire.com) (hiringlab.org) The artificial-intelligence piece is that routine work is easier to automate than higher-judgment work. IEEE Spectrum reported in December 2025 that recruiters were seeing entry-level programming tasks compressed by generative artificial intelligence, even as some companies kept hiring for specialized artificial-intelligence roles. (spectrum.ieee.org) That leaves new graduates facing a market with fewer openings, higher experience demands and more competition for each seat. The first rung is still there, but it is narrower than it was in 2022. (gusto.com) (hiringlab.org)
