The Broken Ladder: How Remote Work, Not AI, Is Reshaping Early-Career Opportunity

Abstract: Post-pandemic labor markets have witnessed a pronounced decline in early-career hiring across developed economies, with the junior share of new hires falling 8-11 percentage points below 2019 baselines by 2025. While emerging research attributes this phenomenon primarily to generative artificial intelligence adoption, this analysis challenges that conclusion. Using 243 million hiring records and 407 million job postings across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia from 2017-2025, difference-in-differences estimates reveal that work-from-home arrangements—not AI exposure—robustly predict declining junior hiring intensity. When analyzed jointly, WFH exposure coefficients remain stable and significant while AI exposure effects attenuate substantially, often becoming statistically indistinguishable from zero. This pattern persists across alternative specifications, measurement approaches, and robustness exercises. The findings suggest organizational frictions associated with remote supervision and distance-mediated learning, rather than technological displacement, primarily drive the early-career hiring contraction.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.