Should You Stay or Quit as AI Reshapes Work?

Additional Resources

• When Switching Employers Is the Right Move
• White House Sets Lower Job Growth Expectations
• ADP Preliminary National Employment Report Estimate
• America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

Welcome back to Cornering the Job Market for Tuesday, February 10th. I’m Pete Newsome, and today’s workforce news and headlines include the White House already pre-spinning the jobs report that is coming out tomorrow. So this was delayed from last week because of the shutdown, and they’ve come out and said Americans should expect smaller numbers. Great. That’s not what we need right now. I’ll break down what’s going on there. Also, the Atlantic just published a major feature on AI and jobs. And this thing is a monster. It’s in their March edition. It was just published online today, where the CEOs of a lot of major companies are talking about AI a lot. They were saying it’s cutting jobs, they’re replacing jobs because of it, rather, and then they’ve gone kind of quiet. And there’s a lot of debate as to why. So we’ll get into that too. But first, Glassdoor just published a new major study analyzing reviews from more than 268,000 workers who left multiple employer reviews between 2021 and 2025. Now, I’m often critical of the review sites because they typically just capture the outliers. They capture the people who are either plants from the companies who are employees who are happy there, new employees, or the companies are looking over their shoulder, telling them to go post five stars, or they’re disgruntled people, whether justified or not. They’re angry, they want to get the company back, and they go and post one-star review. So if you look at these sites, you see a lot of five stars, you see a lot of one, very little in between. So I don’t typically put much faith in those, to be quite frank. But what’s interesting about this is they analyze the same people who posted more than one time. So it does tell a story that I think is more meaningful than looking at these numbers individually. And so the central question they were trying to answer was if you’re unhappy at work, are you better off staying or trying and trying to fix it or making a move? And the answer is pretty pretty clear.

2:00

Workers who gave their employer a one-star review were 81% more likely to switch than those who gave five stars. So that’s no surprise, right? If you’re unhappy and you’re going to give a one-star review, you’re going to leave or you’re probably doing it as you’ve already left. I think that happens most. But I’m surprised that number’s not even bigger. I mean, 81%, it could be 100%, it wouldn’t surprise me. But did leaving actually make things better? Here’s what they found that among the most dissatisfied workers, those who gave a one or two star ratings, the ones who switched, were 88% more likely to see their next rating improve to three stars or better. So if you were unhappy and you left, your ratings went up. I don’t think that’s a surprise either, but I think it is interesting data nonetheless. Now, for workers who gave a middle rating, a three or four-star review, they were 83% more likely to trade up. But if you landed at one of Glassdoor’s best places to work, then you are more than twice as likely to see improvement, 130% more likely. So what that tells us is generally speaking, if you leave, that works. Or specifically, if you’re less enthrilled where you are and you make a move, then odds are it’s going to be better. If you already love your job, so if you’ve given a five-star rating and you switch, you’re 2.1 times as likely to see your rating drop by two or more stars compared to staying. So the grass is not always greener. We know that. This goes for both candidates seeking a new job, trying to determine whether that employer is going to be a good fit, as well as employers interviewing candidates trying to determine whether they’re going to be a good hire.

3:58

But what I’ve always said and truly believe is that you really don’t know what it’s like until you get there, or how I often phrase it is, you don’t know what someone’s like until you live with them, because I’m typically thinking about it from a hiring perspective, as I own a staffing company. And I see companies, our clients waiting to pull the trigger. They’re hesitant, they want to interview over and over and over, trying to ultimately get to a conclusion of whether a person’s going to be a good fit, and you just don’t know. And the same thing is true for candidates. You just don’t know what that job is going to be like until you get there. So I think the takeaway from this is for the most part, if you’re happy where you are, think really long and hard before you make a move. Because there’s a very good chance, according to this, a 2.1 uh times more likely that you’re not going to be as satisfied where you are if you’re already a five-star, you know, given your um your employer a five-star where you are. So good study. This also looked at what turns good jobs bad. So when ratings fell from positive to negative at the same employer, reviews were 3.6 times more likely to mention layoffs, 4.2% times more likely to mention management changes, and twice as likely to discuss burnout. Let me tell you, management change is a killer. When you go to work somewhere, a huge part of that decision and a huge part of your satisfaction is who you report to. And when that shifts, which is one thing as an employee, you absolutely cannot control, it is just a crapshoot. And what this is telling us 4.2 times more likely to be a problem. And that is something that is just unfortunate, right? Because you can’t control it. We can’t predict it. Um, but interesting to see it come out in the data nonetheless. That’s on Glassdoor if you want to check it out.

5:48

In the next story, not quite as fun. The White House expects smaller jobs numbers. ADP reported numbers too. They came out with their weekly update, so I’ll share that in a second. But the White House said, lower your expectations. Specifically, Kevin has it said you should expect slightly smaller job numbers that are consistent with high GDP growth right now. One shouldn’t panic if you see a sequence of numbers that are lower than you’re used to because population growth is going down and productivity growth is skyrocketing. So there’s some truth to that. Uh that, yes, we are gaining efficiencies. There, productivity is going up, but there’s also more people who are unemployed right now than there are open jobs. And that’s undeniable. So there’s no way the White House can spend that. Um that’s just a bad thing for everyone in the U.S. And that hasn’t been the case since COVID times. So this has been trending, things have been trending in that direction, and now that is where we are as of December, and I haven’t seen anything to indicate that that’s going to change anytime soon. It sounds like they’re warning us that things may actually get a little worse before they get better. So the consensus forecast for Wednesday’s delayed jobs report is about 70,000 jobs added, with unemployment expected to hold steady at 4.4. Last year we averaged 53,000 jobs the last couple of months compared to pre-COVID numbers. The 10-year average was 183,000 jobs that were added. And we need 100,000 to keep up with the population. So 70,000 is bad. 53,000 was even worse. But when you compare that to a 10-year average of 183,000, it’s just no way to put it. Make this sound good. So they’re getting ahead of that.

7:38

Back to the ADP number. They published this morning that private employers added an average of only 6,500 jobs per week for the four weeks ending January 24th. And that’s down from 17 to 20,000 per week back in November. So we’re seeing a significant slide there. Last story for today is published in the Atlantic. And this is for their March issue. It’s online today, and it’s about AI and jobs and what workers can expect going forward and how workers are going to accommodate it. It is way too much to try to get into the details. But the net of it is that there were some big statements that were very highly publicized from CEOs like Dario Amade from Anthropic.

8:20

He said that uh AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20% in the next one to five years and wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. That statement, I talk about it all the time because it was so profound. And then Ford CEO Jim Farley estimated AI would eliminate literally half of all white-collar workers in a decade. These are unambiguous statements. These are significant. But what the author of the article talks about is this his CEO commentary has effectively stopped, right? They’re not making these bold statements all at once. Although I would argue they still are. Amade was at Davos a couple weeks ago, not backing off his claim at all. He’s he’s sticking with it. But Reed Hoffman was quoted in the article. He says that he he’s calling it a failure of the imagination, implying that AI is going to be the reason so many are cutting headcount. And like I said a few minutes ago, I’m just not convinced of that. And neither are many Americans. 71% told Reuters, according to this article, it’s consistent with data I see, that they’re worried AI will put too many people out of work permanently. And yeah, once those jobs go away, they’re not coming back. These aren’t going to be temporary measures when automation replaces what a human used to do. Also, in this article, it references a Stanford paper that found workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs, saw a 13% decline in employment since late 2022. So young people can’t get hired. Those are the first jobs to get replaced.

9:56

This is such a moving target right now. When in everyone’s trying to focus on what is happening right now, in the moment. And as I’ve described it before, if you’re standing at the base of a rocket and you’re judging where that’s going based on what’s happened as the countdown is underway, and you’re saying, there’s nothing to see here. This rocket isn’t impressive, it hasn’t gone anywhere, there’s no impact. Yeah, wait until it launches, right? Wait until it begins its trajectory and you see where it’s going to end up. Not when we’re still in the countdown phase with AI. We’re still this AI rocket has not launched. It’s only a couple of years old. And and yes, AI technically is older than that, but it hasn’t been released to small businesses, to entrepreneurs, to large businesses in the way that it was just a few years ago. And so it it scares me. I I end up talking about it in almost every episode, even if that’s not part of the headlines, although it was today, that we’re just too dismissive based on what hasn’t happened yet, where we need to be focused on what is going to happen in the very near future. And I believe is happening already. So those are the headlines for today. Thank you for listening. Before we go, here is your fun fact. Julie Roberts, you all know Julie Roberts. She once worked at a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop. So all these actors and actresses were kids at one time. They had to work somewhere. I’m assuming that wasn’t uh after she started acting, but there you go. Fun fact I don’t really have any comments on that one. Julie Roberts, Baskin Robbins. I do love ice cream. I’ll say that. But thank you for listening. That’s it for today. Please like, subscribe, share with anyone who might be interested, and I’ll look forward to talking to you tomorrow.