The Missing Bench

Claire Monroe

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, I want to talk about a trend that looks like smart cost management today and might look very different in five years. Entry-level hiring is shrinking. The venture firm SignalFire looked at the largest tech companies in its 2025 State of Talent report. New graduates made up just seven percent of their hires, and new grad hiring was down more than fifty percent from 2019.

Edwin Carrington

More than half, Claire. And I understand the logic in every individual decision behind that number. Budgets are tight. AI can draft the first version of the report, clean the data, write the routine code. Why pay someone to learn on the job when the job's easiest parts are already done? In any single quarter, that reasoning holds up.

Claire Monroe

So what's the problem?

Edwin Carrington

Every senior leader you have started somewhere near the bottom. Your best director was once a junior analyst who made mistakes on low-stakes work, learned from them, and was gradually trusted with more. If you stop hiring juniors today, you haven't only saved salaries. You've removed the people who were supposed to be your managers in five years and your executives in fifteen.

Claire Monroe

And this isn't only a tech story. Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab used payroll data from ADP covering millions of workers. They found that employment for people aged twenty-two to twenty-five in the occupations most exposed to AI has fallen well behind their peers in less exposed jobs, by a double-digit margin. But experienced workers in those same occupations showed no comparable gap.

Edwin Carrington

That last detail is the important one. The experienced people are fine. It's the entry point that's closing.

Claire Monroe

And the decline was concentrated in jobs where AI automates tasks rather than helping people do them. I should be careful here, though. The authors describe these as patterns, not proof that AI caused them.

Edwin Carrington

That's a fair caution. But the mechanism isn't hard to see. The routine work AI is absorbing is exactly the work juniors used to learn on. Summarizing the meeting. Building the first draft. Checking the numbers. Those tasks were never valuable for their own sake. They were the apprenticeship. They were how a young person learned how the business actually works, and how a manager learned whether that young person could be trusted with more.

Claire Monroe

So we didn't just automate the tasks. We automated the training ground.

Edwin Carrington

Precisely. And there's a second effect. SignalFire's report described what it called an experience paradox. Companies still post junior roles, but they fill them with experienced people. So the new graduate needs experience to get the job that would have given them experience.

Claire Monroe

Let me push back on behalf of the CFO, though. If AI does the routine work, and juniors take two years to become productive, and half of them leave for a competitor anyway, isn't it rational to just hire experienced people when you need them?

Edwin Carrington

For one company, in one year, it can be. Across an industry, over a decade, it's a trap. If everyone waits to buy experienced people, there's no one producing them. The ones who exist get more expensive every year, and they arrive knowing nothing about how your organization actually works. Ram Charan and his co-authors made this point years ago in The Leadership Pipeline. Leadership is learned in sequence. You learn to manage yourself, then to manage others, then to manage managers. Each step builds on the one before. You can't skip to the top of a pipeline you never filled.

Claire Monroe

So what should a company do, if it genuinely needs fewer juniors than before?

Edwin Carrington

Three things. First, if you're hiring fewer juniors, hire them more carefully. Stop judging early-career candidates mainly on current technical output. That's precisely the part AI is taking over. Judge them on how quickly they learn and how they're wired to operate under pressure, because that's what will determine whether they can lead in five years.

Claire Monroe

And second?

Edwin Carrington

Redesign the junior roles around judgment, not routine. If AI writes the first draft, the junior's job is to check it, question it, and explain what's missing. That builds the judgment the old routine work used to build, faster. Third, look harder at the people you already have. Leadership potential is often sitting two levels down, invisible, because performance reviews measure output and not readiness.

Claire Monroe

That third one is where behavioral data comes in.

Edwin Carrington

It is. A validated behavioral assessment shows something performance reviews don’t: how someone tends to operate under pressure. Compare your people with the ones who already lead well, and you’ll often find potential in people nobody has thought to promote yet. That turns succession planning from politics into evidence. It’s one structured input, never the only one. But it lets you build the bench deliberately instead of hoping it appears.

Claire Monroe

If you want to see what your future leaders might have in common with your current best people, start with the person you trust most on your team. OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

Every leader on your team was once someone's risky junior hire, Claire. Somebody took that chance on them.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always a pleasure, Claire.