LinkedIn Says Hiring Down 20%, Blames Rates, Not AI

LinkedIn’s hiring data shows a sharp slowdown, but the company says the bigger drag is macroeconomic, not artificial intelligence. Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s chief global affairs and legal officer, said hiring is down about 20% since 2022 and said the company has not seen clear evidence that AI is reducing hiring in the jobs people most often worry about, including customer support, administrative work and marketing.

Speaking at Semafor’s World Economy summit in Washington, D.C., Lawit said LinkedIn also does not yet see a sharper drop in hiring for college-aged workers entering the labor market than for midcareer or later-career workers. He cautioned that AI’s influence could still show up later, but said the current labor data does not support the idea that it is already driving the hiring slowdown.

That caution matters because the broader labor picture is weak. LinkedIn’s 2026 labor-market reporting, summarized by the World Economic Forum, says global hiring is nearly 20% below pre-pandemic levels, with the steepest weakness in advanced economies. The same data attributes the slowdown mainly to economic uncertainty, monetary policy shifts and the aftereffects of the post-pandemic hiring rebound, not to AI.

LinkedIn is also trying to frame AI as a labor-market creator rather than a destroyer. The company says AI has helped create more than 1.3 million new roles and more than 600,000 AI-enabled data center jobs. Yet the same data shows how unsettled workers feel: 52% of people are job hunting in 2026 and nearly 80% say they feel unprepared to find a new job.

Other labor researchers are drawing a similar line between fear and evidence. Yale’s Budget Lab said in an October 2025 analysis that measures of exposure, automation and augmentation show no sign of being related to changes in U.S. employment or unemployment since ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch. The lab said broad technological disruption tends to unfold over decades, not months.

The immediate U.S. backdrop is a softer job market. J.P. Morgan said hiring weakened through 2025, with monthly payroll growth averaging about 50,000 jobs, while businesses stayed hesitant amid uncertainty. The bank expects rate cuts and tax cuts to help in the second half of 2026. For now, the labor data points more clearly to a macro slowdown than to an AI-driven hiring shock, even as workers worry that the first signs may appear in entry-level recruiting long before official statistics catch up.