LinkedIn’s Blake Lawit, the chief global affairs and legal officer of the Microsoft-owned professional networking site, confirmed in an interview at the Semafor World Economy summit this week that the company’s data shows a decline in hiring of around 20% since 2022.
However, he pushed back at the idea that AI was to blame.
“At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills. It’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked — because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We’ve looked and, honestly, we haven’t seen it,” he said during his interview.
Instead, the executive suggested that the decline in hiring was more closely tied to a rise in interest rates.
“We have not seen the sort of impacts that you would expect to see in areas that everyone is talking about AI… like industries, whether or not it’s customer support, or administrative, or marketing — all these places that if we were seeing impacts [from] AI that’s where it would be,” Lawit continued.
“Yes, hiring’s down, but not down more,” he added.
Lawit also noted that LinkedIn’s data didn’t indicate that the decline in hiring of college-aged young adults getting their first jobs was “down more,” either, when compared with people who were in the middle of or later in their careers.
Still, he didn’t rule out that things could change.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen in the future, but not yet.”
On that point, however, Lawit had a warning of sorts. Lawit noted that over the last several years, the skills that are needed to do the average job have changed 25%. With the rise of AI, LinkedIn expects that figure to be 70% by 2030.
“So, even if you’re not changing jobs, your job’s changing on you,” he said.