Entry-Level Hiring at Large Corporations Halved... 'The Blessing of AI' or 'A Leadership Crisis'?[Kim Mun-Gyeong's Leadership Tech] (27)

[Financial News] The job market has recently taken an unsettling turn. The days when companies hired new employees through large-scale recruitment drives to firmly prepare for their organizational future have become a thing of the past in just a few years. The data confirms this trend. According to a survey by a recruitment platform, job postings for permanent entry-level positions at large corporations have fallen by more than 40% from a year earlier. Nearly 80% of companies planning to recruit in the second half of the year said they would hire no more than 10 people. The vacancies left by new hires are rapidly being filled by experienced workers who can be deployed immediately and by artificial intelligence (AI).
Many companies are now quietly calculating costs in their conference rooms. "If AI can do the job well enough, is there really any need to spend time and enormous sums of money hiring entry-level employees?" Judging only by immediate productivity, reducing entry-level hiring seems entirely rational. To executives who must deliver results right away, AI—which works tirelessly and handles tasks at extraordinary speed—may feel like a true 'blessing.' Yet this quiet calculation contains a fatal blind spot. It overlooks the fact that the new hire not brought on today could have become the future leader of the organization a few years from now.


This change is already a global phenomenon. According to a 2026 survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), one in three companies has replaced traditional entry-level roles—including coding, data entry, and customer service—with AI. The situation is no different in South Korea. The Bank of Korea (BOK) analyzed that most of the 285,000 youth jobs lost over the past four years were concentrated in industries with high levels of exposure to AI.

What deserves attention here is that the cause of this crisis cannot be attributed simply to advances in superior technology. Even among companies that adopted AI in similar ways, employment outcomes differed sharply. In automation-centered industries that handed people's work entirely over to AI, youth employment plunged. By contrast, in augmentation-centered industries where people used AI as a tool, there was no notable decline in employment. In other words, it was not the frightening technology itself that eliminated jobs for young people, but the choices made by leaders about how to use AI.
On the surface, this may appear to be a painful problem involving youth employment. From a leadership perspective, however, it is a fundamental and potentially devastating crisis: how to cultivate the organization's future leaders. Great leaders do not suddenly appear out of nowhere. They need a long and arduous period of training—first mastering their assigned work, then managing others, and eventually rising to take responsibility for the organization as a whole.
No one can become an excellent team leader who makes perfect decisions from the first day on the job. As new hires, they stay up all night writing reports, learn to understand the context of the business, establish standards of quality through painful feedback from senior colleagues, and develop practical instincts through successes and failures of all sizes. These seemingly minor early tasks are essential to developing professional expertise and internalizing how an organization communicates. If AI casually takes over even this foundational training, organizations will ultimately face the painful consequence of losing their pipeline of middle managers and executive candidates—the people who form the backbone of the organization.
To make matters worse, the pool of people willing to become leaders is itself steadily drying up. In a 2026 Deloitte survey, only 6% of Generation Z and millennials identified a leadership position as a career goal. The reason is their deep concern about excessive responsibility and burnout. Yet 76% of them said they would like to take on a senior leadership role someday. They are not unwilling to become leaders; rather, they are asking whether the demanding leadership roles offered under the current model are truly worth staking their lives on. It is a double bind: fewer new hires are entering at the bottom, while existing employees' willingness to grow into leaders is weakening at the top.

So should companies simply increase entry-level hiring as they did in the past? No. There is no way to resist—and no need to resist—the broader trend of AI handling simple, repetitive tasks extremely well. The key is not to blindly eliminate entry-level positions, but to ask how their roles should be redesigned. New hires who merely copied documents and entered data would no longer be necessary.
The actions of global companies offer an excellent answer. IBM tripled its entry-level hiring in the United States this year, but completely transformed what those new hires do. Rather than sharply reducing routine administrative work, it assigned them roles that involved communicating directly with customers, thoroughly reviewing AI-generated output, and making independent judgments. Matt Garman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amazon Web Services (AWS), also strongly criticized the idea of replacing junior employees with AI, saying, "The idea of replacing junior employees with AI is one of the most foolish ideas of all." He emphasized that younger employees learn new AI tools more quickly and bring innovative perspectives to their organizations.
These forward-looking companies allow AI to handle simple execution while giving new hires early opportunities to learn how to verify and question its results. By understanding the context of AI-generated output, identifying hidden errors, and gaining experience making final business decisions, new employees build the fundamentals of leadership more intensively than in the past.

The question leaders ask now must therefore change direction completely. Instead of asking, "Can we replace this work with AI and reduce labor costs?" they should ask, "When AI performs this work well, what will our new hires experience, and how will they grow into future leaders?" The former is a question about short-term cost savings; the latter is a question about developing talent for the long-term future.
Hiring and training new employees is always a substantial investment whose returns take the longest to materialize. That is why it is so tempting to make these cuts first when business conditions are difficult. But the cost of stopping this investment will not come due tomorrow. Several years later, it will inevitably return as an enormous bill in the form of a shortage of skilled workers and an absence of leaders.
A leader's short-sighted choice can do more than reduce costs; it can completely cut off the very beginnings of the organization's future leaders. Before reducing entry-level hiring while intoxicated by the blessing of the AI technology in front of them, leaders must ask themselves a serious question: In an organization that has removed the first rung of the ladder, where will the leaders of the future come from?
/Kim Mun-Gyeong (Adjunct Professor at Kookmin University and Vice Chairman of the Korean Leadership Society) 






[email protected] Jeong Myeong-jin, Medical Specialist Reporter