Disclaimer: The thoughts and points in this article are my own and not affiliated with any organization I currently or have previously worked with.

The job market sucks. You don’t need to read this article to know that. There are thousands of green banners flooding your LinkedIn desperately trying to find work in a market that is a losing game right now. August job postings were at their lowest levels since December 2024. As of this month, for the first time in years – we officially have more unemployed people than job openings. Most job seekers are throwing out thousands of applications (qualified or not), in a futile attempt to get a call back and plead their case for gaining stable employment again (or get out of their hell hole situation of in-office work). Employers are frustrated and can’t believe job seeker behavior right now – but it’s a hunger game – and there are no rules anymore in this environment.

For every 100 unemployed job seekers, there are only 99 available open jobs.

So why is this happening? Let’s do a quick re-cap (sans any political/economical opinions). COVID changed the game of employment on numerous levels – remote work, weird and new market demands that skyrocketed certain industries based on new buyer behaviors (looking at you Amazon)…life changed, and people changed because of it. With all that domino effect, we saw a HUGE spike in the need for workers to support all of this new commerce and market behavior….so companies were DESPERATELY hiring. With that – we saw crazy employer behavior. Insane compensation packages and perks, lower requirements, and the elimination of pre-employment testing that existed previously…the flood gates opened – and they STILL couldn’t get enough hires through the door and create enough compelling reason to keep them from going to the next company for more. Competition at its finest – and job seekers rejoiced!

Now let’s jump to 2022-2023….all of these companies quickly realized they may have jumped the gun…..market demand started to level off and now they’re all overstaffed and over-spending. What follows is “Right-sizing”. Wave after wave of layoffs has been the theme for the past few years. Impacting millions of people. As time goes on, the layoffs have been getting expensive for these organizations, so we’ve also seen forced attrition moves in the form of pay reductions and return to office initiatives, forced relocations, etc. It’s the wild west.

Where does the conversation end? We’ve created a tit for tat job seeker vs. employer eco-system. Job seekers had the upper hand first and now employers are reveling in their leading position. I often hear from folks “the pendulum will swing back though…and when it does…..etc. etc.” I used to believe that -and I wanted to believe that. But my thoughts have quickly shifted and here’s why.

AI is advancing at just the right time and pace to completely shatter this pendulum.

Five years ago, AI felt somewhat like a theoretical solution that most of us were just reading about in articles. Most of us are not early adopters and we work for companies that are not early adopters so we assumed it would be decades until the real application of AI in the workplace would start impacting us directly. We consistently took solace in the experts telling us that AI would never be able to replace humans in the workplace. I am not sure where this delusion came from other than pure hope, and lack of understanding. We were all just very ignorant. It’s ok – I’m swallowing the pill too.

AI has advanced exponentially faster than I or anyone could have anticipated, and guess what…the capability and application is no longer just a TOOL that we can use within our jobs. I know I’ll take some heat on this with many experts justifying how there will be some middle ground…. but hear me out:

AI IS THE CHEAP REPLACEMENT FOR YOUR JOB.

That said, my biggest fear (which I believe is coming true before our eyes) is that we’re all waiting for the pendulum to swing back, but it won’t. We’re waiting for the economy to get us to a place where companies NEED to increase their workforce headcount and open up positions again. That place where job seekers have the upper hand again because companies need us more than we need them. I truly FEAR this isn’t going to happen because I believe by the TIME that happens – (circa 12-24 months) – the pace at which AI is advancing – will be positioned to take over a HUGE portion of jobs. The jobs will range from customer service, administration, retail, legal, technical, medical, etc. Any job that exists more for knowledge and expertise, as well as jobs that manage administrative tasks – unfortunately can be easily and cheaply replaced by what AI has to offer…RIGHT NOW.

My prediction is that the tech companies will be the first to really leverage an AI workforce at scale – and the irony of the product replacing the creator is not lost on me….but who needs expensive coders and developers when AI will be able to do that work in minutes?

Second prediction is that this will inevitably (more long term) be the downfall of the tech industry. Innovation will now come from AI vs. Tech entrepreneurs.

So where do we go from here? I don’t have answers. I have hope.

Many people are advising people that the way to beat this is by “up-skilling”, and I can support that. We should all be continuously learning and growing, but is 24 months (my estimated timing) even enough time for people to learn the skills necessary that might salvage their job?

Others will say pivot to the trades. But there is a significant amount of people who are not physically capable of trade/manual labor work, and skilled trades gets us back to the question of timing. Is there enough time for folks to do this before it’s too late?

Now, there WILL be new jobs created by this AI evolution, and I think this is where many of my peers are holding out hope for the future. AI Auditors, Anti-bias testers, AI prompters/teachers, etc. These will all be NEW fields of work for humans to help shape and govern AI. Maybe this will be enough to mitigate the potential danger of a massive, displaced workforce? I am not as optimistic about this, but….I could be wrong!

I’m genuinely afraid we’re unknowingly creating the next caste system in our society by displacing a HUGE portion of our workforce in the name of cost effectiveness. Don’t get me wrong – I support the efficiencies and innovation we can gain from implementing AI solutions (maybe I should have started with that…). But if the regulation of what we allow AI to do doesn’t speed up, what WILL Be done to increase profits is going to have swift consequences. We’re already seeing what happens in a saturated job seeker market. The downstream impacts of this will change everything we know about the path to success. Go to college, get a good job – not quite…..

I have so many more thoughts, but for now, I’ll leave you to marinate on this. Do you think the pendulum will swing back?

Jaylene

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