The Job Market Is Warming Up and Getting Pickier at the Same Time
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For the past 18 months, some of America’s biggest companies treated hiring as a last resort. Now they’re saying the opposite. Employers across tech, transportation, and defense told investors in recent days that they need to add people again to hit their growth targets, according to the Wall Street Journal.
I’ve been waiting for a story like this one, because for a year the AI-and-jobs conversation ran in a single direction and it was always too simple. The companies that quietly stopped backfilling entry-level roles are the same ones now admitting they cut too deep into the wrong layer. We flagged how overblown the AI wipeout predictions had gotten a while back, and the reversal is showing up right on schedule.
The signal underneath the shift is real. U.S. jobless claims fell to 187,000 for the week ending July 18, the lowest level since 1969, per the Labor Department’s July 23 release. Almost nobody is getting pushed out of work right now.
Booz Allen Hamilton is the clearest example. The government contractor cut thousands of jobs last year as federal contracts got slashed, and its head count fell about 7.5% from a year earlier to roughly 30,900 as of June 30. Now its COO, Kristine Martin Anderson, says the firm has to speed hiring back up: “We actually need to accelerate hiring a bit. We’re a little bit behind right now.” The demand sits in national-security work that requires security clearances, which is about as hard to fill fast as hiring gets.
A big part of the change is companies rethinking what AI can actually do on its own. Plenty of them stopped hiring entry-level workers on the assumption that AI agents would cover the gap, and they’ve since decided they still need people working alongside the tools. Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin put it plainly: “Just because you have coding agents doesn’t mean you’re not hiring engineers.”
Franklin’s second point is the one I’d put on a billboard. Companies froze junior hiring first because it looked like the easiest work to automate, and it turned out to be backward. You want the AI-native people coming out of school precisely because they aren’t set in how the work used to get done, and they cost less. Freezing entry-level hiring to save money on AI is how you end up with no bench in three years. We saw the same pattern when the Dallas Fed data showed AI cutting entry-level roles while lifting wages for experienced workers.
Read what these employers are actually asking for, though, because it’s narrow. Alphabet wants AI and cloud people. ServiceNow wants more sales reps with a number to hit. Booz Allen wants cleared national-security talent. Snap-on and the railroad CSX plan to add workers on the production and operations side. Nobody announced a broad hiring spree. The demand is targeted at specific skills, which means the market is getting warmer and more selective at the same time.
MIT’s Paul Osterman, a professor emeritus and author of a new book on employment called “Disposable Workers,” gives the honest counterweight: “Do we need more people? Do we need less people? We have no idea. No one has any idea.” He expects employers to keep treating workers as dispensable while the picture stays this uncertain, and he may be right. My read is that the hiring signals are worth more than the predictions right now, because the predictions have a bad year behind them.
Workers Are Quietly Doing Other People’s Jobs With AI
New OpenAI research shared first with Axios on July 27 found that about 44% of workers’ job-specific ChatGPT requests were for tasks normally handled by a different profession, after the researchers stripped out generic work like drafting emails and scheduling meetings. The study drew on more than 800,000 work-related messages from U.S. business users.
The crossover runs unevenly across roles. Customer service workers led at 77%, designers at 75%, and HR professionals at 69%, while engineering sat at the bottom at 28%. Legal came in at 56%, marketing at 53%, and sales and finance both at 40%. The generalist and support roles are absorbing new territory fastest, while the deep specialist work is holding.
For anyone building a team, the small-company number is the one to watch. Nearly 19% of work requests at the smallest businesses crossed job lines, against about 16% at larger firms. When you’re a 15-person company without a marketer on staff, you don’t post a job, you open ChatGPT. No existing role gets cut, so nothing registers as a layoff. The next hire simply never gets posted, and this version of AI’s effect stays invisible in the unemployment data because the job never existed on paper.
OpenAI’s economists say plainly they can’t tell yet whether AI is creating brand-new cross-job work or just speeding up things people were already responsible for, and they didn’t measure quality, productivity, or hiring decisions. Chief economist Ronnie Chatterji framed it this way: “The boundaries between jobs are likely already becoming more flexible due to AI.” Axios put the bottom line better than I could: AI may change the work people do before it changes the number of people who do it.
The practical move for employers is to stop writing job descriptions around one narrow specialty and start hiring people who can work across two or three lanes with AI behind them.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
Porsche’s 5,000 Job Cuts Are a Warning for the Auto Supply Chain
Porsche will cut another 5,000 jobs by 2035, according to a joint statement today from company management and labor representatives, first reported by Reuters. The reductions avoid forced layoffs through attrition, buyouts, and early retirement, which the statement described as being handled “in a socially responsible manner.”
The new cuts stack on top of a first package of 3,900 jobs plus another 500 that new CEO Michael Leiters announced earlier this year. Add them up, and Porsche has now put roughly 9,400 reductions on the table, though several outlets round the announced total to about 9,000. The deal also keeps the German sites open through the end of 2035 and comes with 2.1 billion euros of investment in the main Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen plant and the Weissach R&D center.
Porsche went from the profit engine of the Volkswagen group to one of its problem cases. The pressures are real: high costs, tougher competition, a collapse in its once-lucrative China sales, and an EV strategy that stalled. Reuters also points to U.S. tariffs, and that driver matters for American readers, because Porsche builds in Europe and sells a lot of cars here, so trade policy lands directly on its cost sheet.
The timeline is what separates the European playbook from the American one. Porsche is spreading 5,000 cuts across nearly a decade and negotiating them with labor. A U.S. automaker under the same pressure would announce the number on a Tuesday and walk people out by Friday. Germany trades speed for stability and pays for it in flexibility.
The part worth watching is that Porsche is already on its second package, and VW CEO Oliver Blume is pushing to roughly double job cuts across the whole group toward 100,000. When a company announces cuts in waves like this, it usually means management doesn’t see a clear bottom yet. For anyone in the U.S. auto supply chain or the plants tied to these brands, staged cuts abroad are the early tremor, not the whole quake.
My bottom line for employers is simple. The demand coming back is narrow and skills-specific, and the teams that win this stretch move fast on the exact people they need without over-hiring the way everyone did after COVID. If you have roles to fill and you want them filled right the first time, see how we help companies hire, or talk to us about our staffing services. If you’re on the other side of this market and looking for your next move, start with our open jobs.
