Northeastern survey links AI to fewer entry-level hires among some hiring managers

AI is changing the route into work before a new hire starts. In Northeastern University survey findings published November 2, roughly half of hiring decision-makers said AI affected their choices. Within that group, 26% reported hiring fewer entry-level candidates, compared with 7% hiring more—a marked imbalance in their accounts of AI’s influence.

The AI & Society Survey examined responses from 8,174 people who said they had a say in hiring. Its entry-level finding describes a subset of those respondents: people who said AI made a difference to their decisions. It does not mean that 26% of all surveyed employers reduced junior hiring.

These are respondents’ accounts of hiring decisions, rather than a count of jobs eliminated or proof of AI’s economy-wide employment effects. Survey co-author John Wihbey, a Northeastern professor of media and communications technology, nevertheless described the concern plainly: “The fears around entry-level jobs are real.”

Software gets the first look

AI already plays a substantial role at the application stage. Fifty-four percent of hiring decision-makers said they use it to review résumés. In technology, the figure reached 83%. As Wihbey and his colleagues put it, “increasingly, software reads the résumé before a person does.”

The response is happening on both sides of the hiring process. Joseph Lazzarotti, a lawyer at Jackson Lewis, told Northeastern Global News that applicants use AI to reach more employers, while hiring managers use it to sort the resulting applications. The same technology helps generate the material and filter it.

Speed does not settle whether the screening produces better hires. Nicholas Corcodilos, founder of career-advice publication Ask The Headhunter, warned that employers using the same screening software as competitors risk repeating their errors. Employment lawyer Gary Friedman added that automated mistakes can multiply far beyond the scale of a human reviewer’s errors.

About 40%View it as a plus

About 40% of hiring decision-makers viewed a candidate’s use of AI for every writing or coding assignment positively.

21%Discouraged from making an offer

Twenty-one percent said that use of AI would discourage them from making an offer.

No single checklist for beginners

AI fluency is not yet a universal hiring requirement. Almost half of decision-makers said AI experience was not explicitly on their radar. Among those seeking it, a slight majority said AI-savvy applicants were easy to find. Respondents in IT and finance-related fields sought those skills more than those in the arts, agriculture or nonprofits.

Traditional qualifications still carry weight. Around 38% said a college degree makes a candidate more valuable, including about one in five who said much more valuable. Wihbey suggested that college-developed critical thinking can help graduates write useful prompts and judge AI’s work, rather than simply handing assignments over to it.

The people hiring want training, too

The adjustment extends to recruiters and managers. About seven in ten hiring decision-makers said more AI training would be useful. Compared with respondents in other roles, they were almost twice as likely to expect AI to make them more productive—and twice as likely to say most or all of their work could be outsourced to AI.

The survey did not explore what that expectation would mean for hiring managers’ future employment. Friedman described the competing possibilities for beginners as AI hollowing out the bottom rung of the career ladder or turning it into an escalator. His distinction leaves the central choice with employers: use AI to reduce opportunities, or help newcomers advance faster.