The Narrative That Arrived Too Early
Since late 2022, the share of new hires going to early-career workers has fallen sharply across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Between 8 and 11 percentage points, depending on the country. The explanation that took hold was clean and urgent: generative AI had arrived, and firms no longer needed junior workers to do the routine cognitive tasks they were once hired for. LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer called it the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking. Stanford economists documented a 16 percent relative employment decline for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles. A consensus formed quickly.
A new paper published argues that consensus is premature.
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Two Shocks, One Verdict
The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring, by Peter Lambert of Warwick and LSE and Yannick Schindler of Oxford’s Ellison Institute of Technology, draws on 243 million new hire records and 407 million online job postings collected across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia from 2017 to 2025. It tests two explanations for the junior hiring decline at the same time: generative AI exposure and the shift to working from home.
When each is tested in isolation, both look like plausible drivers. When they are estimated jointly, the AI effect collapses toward zero. The WFH effect holds.
The reason is a correlation that most prior studies had not accounted for. The occupations most exposed to generative AI are almost exactly the occupations that shifted most heavily to remote work after the pandemic. Software developers, data scientists, financial analysts, management consultants: high on both lists. Electricians, construction workers, janitors: low on both. The rank correlation between WFH and AI exposure across 683 occupations is 0.77. Studies that controlled only for AI exposure were inadvertently measuring the effect of remote work.
It is also worth noting that Lambert co-authored the research that produced the WFH exposure index this paper depends on. The researcher behind one of the most widely used measures of remote work adoption is now arguing that WFH, not AI, is the primary driver of the junior hiring decline. That matters.
Why WFH Reduces the Appeal of Junior Hires
Firms do not hire junior workers purely for their current output. They hire them as an investment. Those workers are expected to develop, absorb organizational knowledge, and eventually become the experienced talent that drives long-run performance. That investment model depends on two things working: junior workers need to learn quickly, and the cost of supervising them while they do needs to stay manageable.
Remote and hybrid work puts pressure on both. When teams are dispersed, the feedback loops that accelerate early-career development slow down. Research by Emanuel, Harrington, and Pallais found that physical proximity to colleagues significantly increases developmental feedback for junior employees, with the largest gains for the youngest workers. Aksoy and colleagues found that even one day a month in the office, compared to fully remote, raised productivity and communication between workers and their managers. Each junior hire also places a greater demand on senior time when oversight has to happen at a distance.
The paper tested this directly. Firms that adopted remote work in 2021 to 2022, matched against comparable organizations, subsequently shifted hiring toward more experienced candidates. That shift shows up in the actual hiring behavior of real organizations, after controlling for AI exposure.
This Is an Operations Problem
That distinction matters enormously for what organizations should do about it.
If AI is replacing junior workers, the available tools are blunt. Wage subsidies. Policy intervention. Structural redesign of roles. The problem operates at the level of the technology, not the organization.
If WFH is the primary driver, the problem is operational. The frictions that hybrid work creates around supervision, mentoring, and on-the-job learning are surmountable. They belong to organizations that have not yet adapted their management practices to the environment they now operate in.
The questions that follow are practical. Are early-career employees getting meaningful in-person time with the senior colleagues who develop them? Are attendance patterns creating the conditions for learning, or simply filling a headcount requirement? Are your most junior hires co-located with their managers on the days they come in, or arriving on different days from the people responsible for their development? Is your hybrid strategy built on data about how your teams actually work, or on assumptions made when the policy was first written?
Without reliable answers, organizations are managing the pipeline for their future senior talent without knowing whether it is functioning.
What the Right Intelligence Makes Possible
Kadence gives workplace operations leaders the behavioral data to understand whether hybrid attendance is actually supporting the conditions that early-career development depends on. Which teams are overlapping in the office. Whether junior and senior employees are co-located on the right days. Whether the patterns emerging from your workplace reflect genuine collaboration or coincidental presence.
The goal is not to reverse the flexibility that employees value. The research is clear that returning to pre-pandemic working arrangements is neither realistic nor desirable. The goal is to design hybrid working with enough intelligence to preserve the investment case for junior talent.
The paper’s authors describe their finding as cause for optimism. In their words:
Surmountable problems have operational solutions. Operational solutions sit inside the organization, not outside it.
The Strategic Advantage
The junior hiring decline has been framed as a structural consequence of technology. Something happening to organizations, not inside them. The Broken Ladder argues for a different reading: most of what looks like AI displacement may be an organizational problem that better hybrid work management can solve.
Organizations that figure out how to develop early-career talent inside hybrid structures will not just repair a damaged pipeline. They will build a structural advantage over competitors still waiting for the technology story to resolve itself.
The ladder is not broken. The management practices around it just need to catch up.
Want to understand whether your workplace is structured to develop the junior talent your organization depends on? Book a demo with our workplace operations experts.
