The market is improving. Here's how I can tell.
I was at an event last week where someone asked me how do I know that the job market is getting better. It's because companies are hiring back the roles they cut for AI, since nobody budgeted for how much actual supervision AI needs.
Just have a quick look at LI jobs and see for yourself what kind of roles are currently being posted. And there's more data to back it up: In a Robert Half survey, 32% of 2,000 hiring managers said their organizations had restored the exact roles they eliminated because of #AI or automation gains. Among those, 40% pointed to organizational know-how or context beyond AI’s capabilities.
Some of the people asked back were the same people AI had replaced, and half of them wanted a substantial pay increase before agreeing to return. Who can blame them?!
And if you lead a team in the #Netherlands, Dutch law planned for this boomerang long before ChatGPT. If you dismissed someone through UWV for economic reasons and need that work done again within 26 weeks, you may have to offer them the job back first.
AI job cuts are real and not all of those redundant roles have come back. But, I'm old enough to remember the Y2K panic. Then came the 2008 crash, a pandemic, and now AI will apparently replace us all. In the meantime, we all still have #jobs - even if they are not exactly the ones we thought we would have 20 years ago.
My point is that, eventually, every job will change. That’s the nature of #work. Accepting it and adapting will get you a lot further than catastrophizing, and as a leader, catastrophizing gets expensive fast. It turns into decisions, and those decisions turn into headcount, bad investments and overhead costs.
So where should leaders put their energy? Into the two things AI can’t do for you.
The first is judgment (or let's call it wisdom). Spotting that an output is wrong - and, crucially why it went wrong - takes context and experience, which is exactly the thing those companies found they had lost. Someone has to do the critical thinking and usually that someone is not a chatbot.
The second is growing people. AI can’t mentor anyone. A junior who doesn't have a measuring stick for what good work looks like needs someone to offer perspective and guidance.
However, if most of your week goes to status updates and reporting, I have news for you: that’s the part of your job AI is coming for. 😅
🌟Sparking Leadership # 65: a weekly series on human-centered sustainable #leadership. Reach out if you want to become the best leader you can be or follow for more sparkling content. In the meantime, lead with spark! ✨️
