Why Stopping Junior Hiring Is Both the Right Call and the Wrong One

Something new is happening in marketing, and not enough people are talking about it yet.

Over the past months I sat down with agency founders, training specialists, and leaders in marketing. I wanted to understand how AI is influencing things for junior talent. How hiring is changing, what skills are expected, but mostly, what this means for marketing as a profession over the next few years.

Speaking to all these different people, I started to realise a very uncomfortable truth.

A lot of companies I spoke to have either greatly reduced, or stopped hiring for junior talent entirely. Funnily enough, a lot of them also told me juniors have never had a better opportunity. I think both things can be true at the same time.

Because for each of those companies this decision makes sense on its own. The real problem occurs when everyone makes the same decision at the same time.

So what is causing this shift? And how does it actually play out?

The decisions are already being made

Wesley (Ubo) put the reasoning plainly: 'Garbage in is garbage out. If you want AI adoption to happen at the right level, you need people who can actually evaluate the output.' It's a sentiment I hear across almost every agency I speak to. The focus has shifted almost entirely to mid-level and senior hiring in marketing.

And it’s not just agencies. Across companies of all sizes the focus is on medior and senior talent. As we've seen across the industry, the work that used to justify hiring someone at the start of their career has been automated for the most part. Everyone is looking for people that have judgement that takes years to develop. So naturally, companies skip the bottom of the ladder and hire people who already have that experience.

I spoke to a labor market platform that tracks hiring patterns across dozens of markets globally. There is a lot of speculation on how AI will influence the market. But one thing is consistent throughout all markets: There is a slowdown in junior hiring across knowledge economy jobs, happening regardless of whether local economies are growing or shrinking.

In marketing specifically, it even goes so far that, more and more often, when someone leaves a marketing team, the position just closes.

Learning AI is not the same as learning marketing

Most people I spoke to do agree on one thing: juniors have a real opportunity right now.

Anyone who has grown up with this technology and knows how to work with AI tools in ways that more experienced people around them probably haven't figured out yet, has a big advantage. That's a fair point.

The problem is in how they are given the opportunity to experiment with it.

Ulrich, CEO of Skilllab, a labor market platform that has tracked skill requirements and hiring patterns across governments and companies globally, put it simply. "Junior employees struggle to judge the quality of their output. If junior staff does not develop the skills to create great work by themselves, they never develop the judgement to know what good looks like."

This is actually two problems feeding each other. A junior who has never written copy from scratch has a harder time seeing if the one generated by AI is any good. They don’t have the “instinct” yet. And because they use AI to develop their briefs, it’s far harder to actually develop that “instinct”. The more they rely on the tool, the further they fall behind on the thing the tool cannot teach them. They don’t necessarily become a faster junior marketer. They become someone producing things they cannot properly evaluate.

The promise of skills-based hiring. And why it's mostly still a promise

Dirk, CEO of Jobtraining, An Amsterdam-based company that drives sustainable behavioural change within organisations through a unique combination of AI-powered learning and live soft-skills training, mentioned something that stuck with me. "The person who knew the most used to get promoted. That's over. Knowledge is a commodity now. Anyone can get it." If that's true, and it largely is, then what matters is what you can actually do. A lot of people are arguing that specific skills right now are becoming far more important. 

In practice it rarely works that way.

The market has been talking about skills-based hiring for years. Research suggests that the majority of companies now claim to have incorporated this in some shape or form. But the studies actually tracking hiring outcomes found that the number of hires actually affected by skill based hiring is negligible. 

So the junior that prepares themselves by building something, or shows a specific capability rather than a list of soft skills, may still find the door closed. Most companies agree with the idea of hiring for skills over experience. But actually having to change your whole approach to hiring is super difficult in practice. Because then it comes down to how you actually assess this in a structured way.

And even the companies trying to move in this direction tend to fall back on the same vague language. “Adaptability. Cross-functional thinking.” As a recruiter I hear these terms every single day when asking about specific skills needed for a job.

There is a pattern here that’s much bigger than just marketing. Every time the labor market faces a huge shift, companies tend to focus on soft skills. It happened during the dot-com era, during the rise of social media, and it’s happening again now. It’s a valid response to not knowing. When you’re not sure which hard skills will matter three years from now, you hire for the person you trust to figure it out.

And it’s probably the right choice for now. Slowly new hard skills are starting to take shape. Working with AI agents, setting up automated workflows. But we’re definitely not there yet. Just like during the dot-com era, the market will get there. Until it does, soft skills are the best filter most companies have.

The only risk is mistaking a temporary response for a permanent answer.

Good news: you're more efficient. Bad news: so is your invoice

As we all know AI has made everything faster. Projects that used to take weeks, can now sometimes be done in a day, or less. For agencies billing by the hour, that creates a real problem. The same deliverable, but produced faster, generates less revenue under a time-based model. A third of agencies have already received requests from clients for AI discounts. The largest companies in advertising are publicly moving away from time based billing. This was already a topic before AI became mainstream. But now it’s accelerating.

I had an in-depth conversation with Yannick at Flatline Agency about what that transition should actually look like. His conclusion was that shifting to output-based billing makes sense on paper. The market is just not ready for it. Clients are used to paying for time. Agencies are used to charging for it. Figuring out how to price the value of a deliverable rather than the hours behind it is something the whole industry is working through, but nobody has found the answer to.

In-house teams face the same pressure in a different way. Instead of billing a client by the hour, someone receives a salary for forty hours a week. So naturally, a senior who can now do the work of three people on their own is an obvious choice. The junior roles that would have fed the talent pool are the first to disappear when budgets become smaller. And once they go, a lot of the time, they tend not to come back. Or at least not in the same form.

The crisis being built one smart decision at a time

Every hiring manager making the decision to focus less on junior talent right now is making a sensible call. Each decision individually makes sense. Together though, they are cutting off the supply of the very people they will need in five to ten years.

The senior marketers of 2030 and beyond are the junior marketers of today. The ones not getting hired, and therefore not getting that career experience that builds judgement and instinct. The companies making smart individual decisions are quietly creating a crisis of their own making. 

I see it from where I sit. There are far fewer open vacancies for junior roles than there were two years ago. Companies that used to hire across all levels now come to us only for senior profiles. And to be honest, we also focus more and more on senior profiles only. On a high level this is a market problem, and no one is to blame individually.

The real question is not whether juniors can adapt. Most of them can, and will. The question is whether the industry is going to create the conditions for this adaptation to actually lead somewhere.

The question belongs to everyone. Not just founders, agency leaders, and heads of marketing. We should collectively think about this. Add up enough sensible decisions and you can still end up somewhere nobody wanted to go.

So where does that leave us

There are two ways to look at this.

The juniors who figure out AI on a deeper level will be more valuable than any generation before them. New work will emerge. The market always finds a way. That’s probably true. 

But individual effort doesn’t fix a structural problem. If the door stays closed regardless of how well someone prepares, telling them to prepare harder is just a nicer way of leaving them out. At some point the people making hiring decisions need to decide this is worth taking seriously.

Welcome to the paradox.