IBM Is Tripling Junior Hiring. Here's What They Know That You Don't.

Welcome back.

On February 13th, IBM's Chief HR Officer stood up at a conference in New York and said something that caught my attention: "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them."

And then she announced that IBM is tripling its entry-level hiring this year.

Those two statements sound like they contradict each other. They don't. And the reason they don't is worth understanding if you're making any hiring decisions right now.

You already know the numbers. A Korn Ferry report found 37% of organizations plan to replace early-career roles with AI. The unemployment rate among young college grads is sitting at 5.6%, near its highest level in over a decade outside the pandemic. Most companies are hiring fewer juniors, not more.

IBM looked at the same data that everyone else did and came to a different conclusion.

Nickle LaMoreaux announced the tripling at Charter's Leading with AI Summit. Her quote: "We are tripling our entry-level hiring, and yes, that is for software developers and all these jobs we're being told AI can do."

But here's the key part. They didn't just triple the headcount for the same old roles. They rewrote what the roles actually are.

Junior software developers used to spend most of their time on routine coding tasks. Now AI handles that. The new entry-level dev role focuses on customer engagement, product development, and working directly with the people who use the software. Less syntax, more context.

In HR, entry-level staffers used to field every employee question that came in. Now chatbots handle the routine stuff. The new entry-level HR role is about intervening when the chatbot falls short, correcting bad output, and talking to managers when the situation requires a human.

The pattern is the same in both cases. AI took the repetitive parts. Humans got promoted to the judgment parts. And the new hires start at a higher level of work from day one.

LaMoreaux put it this way: "I can take a school graduate and give them the tooling so they can actually punch above their weight."

This is the part that stuck with me.

LaMoreaux made the argument that cutting juniors is a short-term play with a long-term cost: "The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment."

The math isn't complicated. If you stop hiring juniors now, you won't have mid-level managers in three years. You won't have senior leaders in five. You'll be forced to poach from competitors at a premium, and those hires will take longer to get up to speed because they don't know your systems, your culture, or your customers.

IBM is treating AI as a reason to redesign the talent pipeline, not to shrink it. And they're not the only ones thinking this way. Dropbox expanded its internship and graduate programs by 25% this year with similar logic.

Most of the conversation about AI and jobs treats it like a binary. Either AI replaces workers, or it doesn't. But what IBM is showing is a third option that doesn't get enough attention: AI replaces tasks, and the roles get rebuilt around what's left.

That doesn't mean the transition is smooth. The 5.6% youth unemployment rate is real. A lot of companies are just cutting headcount without doing the redesign work. And the people getting hurt are mostly the ones who don't have the luxury of waiting for the job market to catch up.

But the companies that do the work to figure out what humans should actually be doing in an AI-augmented environment? They're going to have a serious edge. Not because they're being altruistic. Because they're building the leadership bench that everyone else will be scrambling for in a few years.

If you're making hiring decisions, the question worth asking isn't "can AI do this entry-level job?" It probably can.

The better question is "what should entry-level humans be doing now that AI handles the repetitive parts?"

IBM's answer: customer-facing work, judgment calls, correcting AI output, building institutional knowledge. The stuff you actually need experienced people for later.

If you can answer that question for your own team, you have a hiring strategy. If you can't, you're just cutting headcount and calling it innovation.

This week's question: Is your company hiring fewer juniors because of AI, or redesigning what those roles look like? I want to know what's actually happening on the ground. Hit reply.

Until next week,

Haroon