00:00Joining us now is Ben Zweig, co-founder and CEO of Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company which analyzes data
00:06from LinkedIn, Glassdoor, H-1B visa filings and other public sources.
00:10Ben, this report I know just out this morning is so interesting.
00:13I want to talk about the difference between entry level and more senior level.
00:17But first, just on this idea, the more companies are adopting AI, the more they're hiring.
00:23How then do you square that with individual announcements?
00:25We just had Visa this morning saying, we're working things, we're investing more in AI, and we're letting go 2
00:30,600 people.
00:31Are those two things just unrelated then?
00:33I think they're unrelated.
00:34Yeah.
00:35I mean, we have not seen layoffs of the most exposed firms.
00:38It's actually declined quite a bit.
00:40We've seen growth in layoffs really in the types of industries that are not exposed to AI at all, like
00:45manufacturing.
00:45So that's really driving the layoff results.
00:48Sometimes when companies attribute layoffs to AI, that's really just like a narrative trick, I think.
00:56And doesn't square with the evidence that the companies that are adopting AI at the fastest are the ones that
01:02are growing the most.
01:03And they're growing, again, with their senior level employees.
01:06Maybe entry level jobs aren't as robust.
01:08Does that mean the worst of the fears, that entry level jobs will cease to be plentiful and the career
01:13sort of pipeline will be less robust, that those are starting to play out?
01:17I think so.
01:18So it's a weird time for younger workers.
01:20I mean, one thing I'll say is that, you know, during times of uncertainty, you know, younger workers suffer from
01:25those.
01:25Because they're a more speculative bet, whereas if you want productivity today, tomorrow, you hire more experienced, safer bet workers.
01:32So that's hurting younger workers.
01:34Another thing is that, you know, which makes me a little more optimistic, is that, you know, it used to
01:41be when we talked about AI, we were talking about chatbots.
01:44And everyone and their grandma can use a chatbot.
01:46It's like super low barriers to entry.
01:48And what happened was that, you know, these chat tools were being used to execute on tasks, but not really
01:53used to coordinate tasks and orchestrate tasks.
01:56And this coordination orchestration effort was really biased towards senior workers.
02:01You know, they have more experience in managing.
02:02So it was kind of like a seniority-biased technological change.
02:06But now when we talk about AI, we're talking about agentic stuff.
02:09And that's complicated.
02:10Like, this is pretty complicated to use.
02:12And I think it favors those who are digitally native.
02:15So I think that's helping younger workers.
02:16But just to go more pessimistic again, just because, yeah, we got to tell the dark side, is that the
02:23process of finding jobs and matching with employers is really broken.
02:28Yes.
02:28Okay, wait, can you talk more about that?
02:29Because presumably, if I'm a younger employee, I can just use AI and spam the world with my application.
02:35Yeah, exactly.
02:36There's all these platforms spinning up where you could just, like, auto-apply to 1,000 jobs a minute, which,
02:40you know, sounds great.
02:41But it's becoming like this high-frequency trading type of model.
02:44And the employers are getting completely signal jammed.
02:48So they're overrun with just, like, all these, you know, applications that seem great on their face.
02:54But the utility of posting a job is really eroding.
02:57So what's happening is that companies are just not posting jobs.
03:00And they are relying on networks.
03:03And younger workers don't have networks.
03:05Yes.
03:05So that is, you know, they don't have this, like, investment into their reputation that older workers have.
03:11So it's really hurting younger workers.
03:13So I think they're very frustrated.
03:14They're having a hard time finding jobs.
03:16It's a very tough time for them.
03:17But at the same time, on the other side of that, that you have, I know you talked about in
03:22your report that candidates complaining about recruiters ghosting are up 9%.
03:26So it feels like the other part of the contract, something's going wrong, too.
03:29Yeah, I think so, too.
03:30I mean, you know, on the one hand, you know, employers are starting to try to use AI to kind
03:35of, like, sift through all this.
03:36But you can't really blame them that much because what are you going to do with thousands and thousands of
03:41applicants?
03:42So they're starting to kind of have a preference toward the ones who applied sooner.
03:46So that's where it gets, like, a little bit more high-frequency-esque.
03:49Can we talk about wages, too?
03:51Because there does seem to be any time I either go to San Francisco or talk to anyone who lives
03:56in the Bay Area, they seem to have a much more, I mean, you kind of get a variety, but
04:00maybe more pessimistic of how wealth is going to be transformed, that we're going to have a permanent underclass.
04:05And if you haven't earned generational wealth now, you're out of luck unless you already got that anthropic job that's
04:10paying you a lot.
04:11How are wages evolving, especially ones tied to AI work?
04:15Okay, so it used to be that the most exposed jobs, the jobs that touched AI the most, were, you
04:22know, had a premium.
04:23They were specifically more higher pay.
04:24Now that's eroded basically to zero.
04:27So now we're seeing more equivalence between the pay of jobs that are exposed to AI and the pay of
04:31jobs that are not exposed to AI.
04:32So it's no longer the case that AI exposed roles kind of like, you know, are the higher paying roles.
04:39So that, I think, seems like good news on, you know, in terms of equality and all that.
04:45But I think it's still wrong to say that we are just like driving labor share of the economy down
04:52to zero and it's all going to be driven by capital.
04:54That is not borne out in the evidence.
04:56And I'll say, you know, just a caveat about this tracker, you know, we are tracking what is happening to
05:01the labor market today based on what has happened so far.
05:04That's not to say that, you know, things can't get weird in the future, but I'll leave that to others.
05:08That's not to say that, you know, things can't get weird in the future, but I'll leave that to others.
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