Companies rethink entry-level, graduate and junior hiring

At London-based ad agency Catalyst, one junior employee can now handle five different client accounts.

Previously, several were needed, according to founder Tobias Green. Now, AI tools handle research, write the first pass of copy, and gather data.

“Then you need someone to come in and fix it up,” he said, comparing the arrangement to “a reverse Mechanical Turk.” AI works behind the scenes while the human is the face presented to the client.

It’s changing how the ad agency views entry-level roles. “If AI removes the grunt work, then the grunt work is no longer relevant,” Green told CNBC. “They don’t need to learn those skills … They need to learn how to manipulate and utilise AI.”

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly adept at research, drafting, coding and administrative work — all tasks traditionally given to junior employees across industries. 

This can boost productivity, but experts have also raised concerns about what this means for career advancement and how young workers can develop the required skills in the first place.

Open University’s 2026 Business Barometer report, which surveyed 1,500 business leaders in the U.K., found that 51% of respondents said AI was changing how they hire. Some 19% said they had reduced entry-level recruitment, with 42% of these citing AI adoption as a reason.

Lucy Beaumont, global SVP of product at talent assessment company SHL in Surrey, England, said some major graduate recruiters are hiring fewer people as they assess whether they need the roles at all.

“If we’ve had an organisation that’s a pyramid shape, we’re now seeing what we call a diamond, with more people at that mid-level,” Beaumont told CNBC. It’s a short-term solution that can create something of a crisis for employers when they look to the future, she added. 

“Those entry-level roles, they’re your training ground — that’s where you get your training wheels, you get your badges, get your war wounds, make mistakes and learn how to operate in a corporate environment,” Beaumont added. “If you take that away, it has serious implications for every rung of the ladder.”

Junior roles aren’t disappearing altogether, however. In a survey of 500 U.K. and Irish mid-market leaders by technology consultancy Klarus, 45% said AI was being used to help junior employees work better and faster. Almost a quarter, meanwhile, said it was creating new roles and opportunities.

This is particularly visible in software development. Sheila Flavell, COO of business and technology consultancy at London-based FDM Group, said tools including Claude Code and Codex mean developers are increasingly responsible for overseeing projects being completed by both AI agents and people.

“The skillsets that will be incredibly important are understanding how to work with others,” she told CNBC. AI could, therefore, push junior workers toward overseeing work much sooner in their careers.

But hiring for this new way of working can be challenging. SHL’s Beaumont said some employers were moving away from recruiting graduates into predefined roles, instead hiring for broad capabilities and deciding where to deploy them afterward.

“It is hiring for potential,” she said. “Have you got re-skilling potential? Could we re-skill you onto different things? It doesn’t really matter where you’ve come from.”

Beaumont gave the example of one large global retail bank she works with that is looking beyond traditional talent pools toward graduates in subjects like psychology and law. The bank reasons that changing technical skills can be taught, while capabilities such as critical thinking are harder to build from scratch.

For Cheney Hamilton, director at research firm Bloor, the question is whether junior workers can develop the judgement to supervise work they’ve never learned to do themselves.

She argues that “grunt work” was never just work, but was instead the mechanism through which people accumulated context and judgement.

“AI raises the floor of what a junior can produce, but it doesn’t give them the judgement to know when the output is wrong, and that judgement historically came from repetition and consequence,” Hamilton, who runs Bloor’s research into workplace transformation, added in an interview with CNBC.

That doesn’t mean preserving menial tasks for training’s sake, though. Hamilton said companies can instead treat entry-level work as “exposure” rather than “output,” with juniors checking and correcting AI-generated work while senior colleagues deliberately teach them the judgement around it.

Consultancy FDM Group is experimenting with something similar. Flavell said it now trains people using real business problems and asks them to find solutions using agentic engineering, rather than simply teaching them how the AI tools work – which could leave companies short of experienced workers in the coming years.

“This is why I argue the real issue isn’t ‘early careers’ time served, but ‘early knowledge,'” Bloor’s Hamilton added. “Are we deliberately building the contextual knowledge and judgement that used to accrue by osmosis? If not, you risk a generation with AI-enabled breadth and no depth.”