You’ve probably felt both sides of this. You have an open role and a stack of applications, and somehow nobody in the stack looks ready. Meanwhile, someone you know, maybe a former colleague’s kid or a recent grad you’ve mentored, has sent out two hundred applications without landing a single interview. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the gap between them is getting wider.

The numbers are stark. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that unemployment for college graduates aged 22 to 27 hit 5.6% at the end of 2025, and more than 40% of those who are working hold jobs that don’t require a degree. Junior-level postings fell 7% on Indeed last year and 15% on Handshake, while applications per job climbed 30%. Yet overall unemployment is low and layoffs are limited. Economists call this a low-hire, low-fire market: nobody’s leaving and nobody’s hiring. New workers depend on roles opening up, so they feel it first.

Most leaders default to one of two instincts here, and both backfire.

The first is to let AI absorb the entry-level work. It is good at the repetitive tasks juniors have always cut their teeth on, and plenty of organizations are betting on it. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish within a few years.

The second is to hire experience when you do hire and let AI handle the screening. On Indeed, the share of tech postings requiring five years of experience rose from 37% to 42% between 2022 and 2025. Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI reports that 90% of U.S. employers now use AI to screen candidates. But those tools mostly match keywords, miss transferable skills, and can introduce bias rather than remove it.

Put the two together and you get a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone is hunting for unicorns, people who arrive with every skill on day one. The fewer entry-level roles exist, the fewer people ever get the chance to build those skills. The unicorns get rarer and the search gets harder.

That isn’t a talent shortage. It’s a shortage of organizations willing to develop talent. Some are starting to notice. Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin says many of her clients who swapped entry-level hires for AI have quietly started hiring for those roles again. And the cost goes beyond the pipeline. OECD research finds that multigenerational workforces tend to be more resilient when disruption hits and tend to serve customers better.

Reopening the roles isn’t enough, though. They can’t look like they used to. Here’s how to build entry-level jobs that actually develop people:

• Give them the work AI could do. Let new hires review the memos and interpret the data even when a tool could do it faster. That’s where knowledge, judgment, and intuition get built, and the trade in speed is the investment.
• Graduate them on purpose. Once they’ve mastered the foundational work, move them deliberately into tasks that require creativity, real problem solving, and interpersonal communication, the work leadership will eventually demand of them.
• Make the tools part of mentorship. Don’t assume they’ll figure out AI on their own. Teaching them to use it well is now part of developing them.

It’s tempting to treat this as someone else’s problem. They’re young and they’ll adapt. But every experienced person on your team was once inexperienced, and someone gave them their first shot. The real question isn’t whether entry-level employees are worth the effort. It’s who will be leading your team in ten years if nobody makes that effort now. I dig into all the forces behind this in this week’s video. It’s worth a watch if you’ve been posting roles and wondering where all the good people went.

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Here's some more resources I recommend:

Why You Feel Overwhelmed As A Manager: Most overwhelmed managers blame the size of their team. But Gallup’s research on more than 16,000 U.S. managers points somewhere else. Ninety-seven percent are still carrying individual-contributor work, and those who keep it under 40% of their week stay just as engaged whether they lead four people or twenty-five. Cross that line, and engagement slides as the team grows. This piece explains why the split matters more than the headcount and offers three practical changes, ending with which half of your own work to cut first. Click here to watch now.​

Navigating Change as a Team: Change isn't the problem—unmanaged change is. When teams face rapid change without a clear plan, the emotional and logistical strain adds up fast, and performance suffers. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I walk through how to build a shared vision and clear priorities for change, how to reassign roles and responsibilities to support the effort, and how to set communication norms that keep things transparent instead of chaotic. You'll also learn how to gauge your team's capacity and resilience so you can sustain performance for the long haul. If your team is navigating change right now, this one's built for you. Click here to get started.​