Artificial intelligence is creating a “jobs drought” for graduates and younger people seeking entry-level employment, and things are only going to get worse, according to James Reed, chair of Reed, the world’s largest family-run recruitment firm.
Speaking at the Other Voices festival in Dingle, Co Kerry, London-based Mr Reed said in his 30-plus years in the recruitment business he had never seen shrinking vacancies in a growing economy and the trend is endemic.
“The truth is we haven’t even hit rock bottom yet in terms of decreasing numbers of vacancies – and this holds for all our markets, including Ireland.” he said. “When it comes to the impact of AI, we are not talking about the future here; we are talking about now.”
Reed employs more than 4,500 people across 200 locations around the world, advertising between 1 and 3 million jobs every year. Mr Reed, who is a sponsor of Other Voices, says that swathes of these jobs are now disappearing, referencing white-collar roles in customer service, accountancy and call centres.
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“Our UK data shows that graduate jobs advertised on our website have fallen by two-thirds over the past three years, from 180,000 to 55,000 and we are projecting a further 9 per cent fall for the final quarter of 2025. Other jobs sites are reporting a similar trend.”
Mr Reed said that although many employers are not reducing staff numbers, they are enacting hiring freezes, which tend to have a disproportionate effect on graduate roles and on youth employment in general. In the UK, youth unemployment is now running at 15.3 per cent, its highest level in a decade, disregarding the Covid-19 period. He conceded that the reduction was obviously bad for his own business.
Mr Reed believes that although other factors such as the increase in minimum wage and employer taxes were also contributing to the situation in the UK, over the past three years AI has become and will continue to be the main reason for the reduction in vacancies. Also, unlike previous, cyclical downturns in employment numbers, this is occurring independently of economic performance.
“An entire generation of young people are bearing the brunt of this because new jobs are not being created and although we haven’t lost a large number of jobs just yet, employers are simply not hiring,” he said.
“It is extremely disruptive in the traditional sense of that word and potentially catastrophic, with huge social and political consequences, including the rise of extremism and threatening the functioning of society.
“It happened to blue-collar workers: walk into any car plant now and you will see robots, rather than people. Now, it is happening to white-collar workers, and I believe the relationship between people and work is the big story of our age. Many, many people are already having a hard enough time as it is, and despite the promises from its advocates, I can’t see how AI is going to create jobs.”
