WFH exposure – For two years, hiring slowdowns for young workers have often been pinned on artificial intelligence. But new research using large hiring and job-posting datasets argues that work-from-home exposure is a stronger predictor of weaker junior hiring than exposure
The story of entry-level hiring has been told in two competing ways. One blames artificial intelligence, with senior executives warning that automation could swallow junior white-collar roles. The other blames a different force that has quietly remade how teams work: remote labor.
Over the past two years, the slowdown in entry-level hiring has been widely blamed on artificial intelligence. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he was already seeing “a slowdown in hiring” for junior roles and internships.
But two researchers argue that the companies hiring fewer junior workers may be doing so for reasons tied to how work is supervised—and not necessarily because AI is replacing it.
Their analysis traces what happened to early-career hiring across multiple countries and years. using two big sources of labor-market data: Revelio Labs résumé data covering 243 million new hires. and Lightcast data covering 407 million job postings across the US. UK. Canada. and Australia between 2017 and 2025.
The researchers. Peter John Lambert of the London School of Economics and Yannick Schindler. a senior research economist at the Ellison Institute of Technology. concluded that work-from-home exposure was a much stronger predictor of weaker junior hiring than generative AI exposure. “Our findings point strongly towards WFH exposure as a better predictor of the decline in relative early-career hiring,” they wrote.
That finding directly challenges a growing body of research that suggests ChatGPT and similar AI tools are replacing young workers.
Lambert and Schindler said earlier studies may have confused overlapping trends. Jobs most exposed to AI—including software developers, consultants, accountants, and data scientists—are also jobs most likely to be done remotely.
When the researchers analyzed AI exposure and remote-work exposure separately, both appeared linked to weaker junior hiring. But once they controlled for both at the same time. the AI effect “attenuated heavily and often became statistically indistinguishable from zero. ” while the work-from-home effect remained robust.
In other words: the apparent “AI replacement” story looks less definitive when remote work is treated as a simultaneous driver. The researchers’ conclusion leans toward organizational friction rather than technological displacement.
They point to what remote work changes inside companies. “WFH has been shown to raise the cost of supervising and monitoring workers, and can slow on-the-job learning,” the researchers wrote. “These organizational frictions can erode the value-proposition of investing in early-career talent.”
The squeeze is visible in how hiring has shifted since the pandemic.
The researchers estimate that by 2025. occupations with high remote-work exposure saw a 4-to-5 percentage point larger decline in junior hiring than less remote-friendly occupations. That trend is also reflected in federal data. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.7% in the first quarter. compared with 4.2% for all workers. according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The study also found that entry-level hiring dropped sharply after 2022 across all four countries analyzed, with US entry-level hiring down 29% from pre-pandemic levels.
Even as the research dampens the case for AI being the primary culprit so far, it doesn’t claim AI is irrelevant.
The paper acknowledges that AI is still reshaping entry-level work. Companies are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to automate grunt work traditionally assigned to junior employees, pushing some young workers into higher-level responsibilities earlier in their careers.
But the “when” and “how much” are the core dispute. The researchers say it may simply be too early to conclude that AI is already replacing large numbers of junior workers.
“If, as our results indicate, WFH is reducing the incentive to hire junior talent,” the paper concludes, companies may need to rethink how they train and manage young employees in hybrid workplaces.
That’s the uncomfortable implication for the people waiting for their first paid role. If the barrier is supervision costs and slower on-the-job learning when work is remote. then the problem won’t be fixed by simply rolling out new AI tools—or by blaming them. It will take a workplace model that can actually reproduce the mentorship. coaching. and learning that entry-level hiring is built to deliver.
WFH remote work entry-level hiring junior jobs artificial intelligence generative AI ChatGPT GitHub Copilot labor market Revelio Labs Lightcast unemployment rate Federal Reserve Bank of New York