There was a time when experience was relatively easy to understand as a career asset. People entered the workforce without much of it, employers gave them opportunities to acquire it, and over time that experience became part of what made them valuable. More experience could mean better judgement, deeper expertise, stronger professional networks and the ability to recognise problems they had encountered before.
That relationship is becoming considerably less straightforward.
At one end of the talent market, young people are increasingly finding it harder to get the entry-level opportunities through which experience is built. AI is unlikely to be the only reason, but there is growing evidence that young workers are being disproportionately affected in occupations where generative AI can perform some of the work traditionally given to junior employees.
At the other end, workers who have already accumulated decades of experience are now discovering that experience itself has become a problem. They now frequently considered too senior, too expensive, overqualified, less technologically capable or less adaptable. Unsurprisingly, some experienced workers are now removing experience from their CVs in order to make themselves more selectable.
The result is a new and bizzare talent market. Young candidates seem to have too little experience to be attractive or needed. And older candidates apparently have too much. So, exactly how much experience do employers want?
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The squeeze starts at the bottom
For young people entering the workforce, getting onto the career ladder is becoming harder.
The problem is visible across several major graduate markets. In the UK, graduate hiring among members of the Institute of Student Employers fell by 8% during the 2024/25 recruitment cycle, its weakest year since 2021. Competition for places has gotten fierce. Major employers were receiving an average of 140 applications for each graduate vacancy, up from 86 in 2022/23 and just 38 two decades ago.
The US tells a similar story. Federal Reserve Bank of New York data showed unemployment among recent college graduates reaching around 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, while underemployment rose to 42.5%, its highest level since 2020.
There are signs of the same squeeze here in Singapore. The 2025 Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey found that 83.4% of graduates looking for work were employed within six months, down from 87.1% in 2024. The proportion finding full-time permanent employment fell from 79.4% to 74.4%, while the share that had applied but received no full-time permanent job offers rose from 5.7% to 8.5%.
The reasons are not the same everywhere. Slower economic growth, cautious employers, lower staff turnover and uncertainty about the wider economy have all contributed to weaker hiring. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis found that the broader decline in US job openings explained more of the recent deterioration in employment outcomes for young workers than any of the other factors it examined.
But, of course, AI is increasingly part of the equation too.
The concern is fairly straightforward. Many of the tasks generative AI does well are also tasks traditionally given to people near the beginning of their careers: research, basic analysis, first drafts, document review, routine coding and administrative work. If technology allows a smaller team of experienced employees to complete more of that work themselves, the business case for adding another junior employee weakens.
There are already clear signs of this in professional services. The UK's Big Four accountancy firms have all reduced graduate recruitment in recent years, with reported cuts to graduate intakes ranging from 6% at PwC to 29% at KPMG between 2023 and 2025. However, AI doing the work is not the only explanation. Consulting demand has weakened and firms have been under pressure to reduce costs anyway (possibly also due somewhat to AI).
The strongest evidence that AI may be disproportionately affecting young workers comes from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Its analysis of ADP payroll data covering millions of US workers found that employment among 22 to 25-year-olds in occupations most exposed to generative AI was 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with young workers in less exposed occupations. More experienced employees working in similarly AI-exposed occupations had not experienced the same decline.
Much of that difference appears to be happening through hiring. Companies do not necessarily need to make junior employees redundant to reduce their reliance on junior labour - they simply recruit fewer of them.
There also looks to be an expectation effect at play. Employers making workforce plans today are not only deciding what AI can do now, they are making assumptions about what it will be able to do in two, three or five years. A company that expects routine junior work to become increasingly automated is now thinking twice about expanding a graduate programme - even before the technology is capable of replacing those roles outright. Evidence for how widespread that behaviour is remains limited, but the incentive is not difficult to understand.
This creates a bigger problem than a difficult graduate recruitment season. Entry-level jobs are where people acquire the experience employers later expect them to have (EBN covered this in 2025). Accountants begin with relatively basic accounting work. Lawyers learn by researching, reviewing documents and supporting more experienced lawyers. Recruiters learn by speaking to candidates, sitting in interviews and watching experienced colleagues make decisions. People become senior partly because somebody once employed them when they were junior. All this raises a serious question about how anybody is supposed to become experienced in the first place.
For employers, hiring fewer junior people can make perfect economic sense when viewed one vacancy at a time. Across an organisation, an industry or an entire labour market, the calculation becomes concerning. Today's graduate recruitment is part of tomorrow's talent pipeline.
And for the young people trying to enter the workforce, the immediate problem is simpler. There are fewer opportunities in the places they expected to start their careers, more people competing for them, and growing uncertainty about how much of the work that once provided a first step will still be performed by humans.
Unfortunately, having experience does not necessarily make the other end of the labour market any easier.
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What happens when experience becomes a liability?
If younger workers face questions about whether they have enough experience, candidates at the other end of the career spectrum are now encountering the opposite problem.
Experience itself has almost become a red flag to some employers: higher salary expectations, greater age, slower to move and adapt, potentially outdated skills or the possibility that someone is overqualified for the job and won't be happy to stick with it.
Some of those concerns are perfectly legitimate things to explore during recruitment. An employer has every reason to establish whether a candidate's skills are current, whether their salary expectations match the role and whether someone who previously held a much more senior position genuinely wants the job being offered.
The problem comes when employers assume the answers based on age.
... and there is now plenty of evidence that this happens.
In the US, a particularly stark recent example involved Enterprise Leasing Company of Florida. In September 2025, the company agreed to pay $1.8 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission age discrimination lawsuit concerning recruitment for management trainee positions.
According to the EEOC, applicants aged 40 and above accounted for approximately 15% of applications but fewer than 3% of hires. The agency said it had identified more than 125 potential witnesses who could testify about being asked their age or graduation year, being told that most candidates were fresh out of college, being discouraged from pursuing the role or encountering other age-related comments. EEOC
The case was settled rather than establishing liability at trial, but the numbers illustrate why age deserves attention as a recruitment issue rather than simply an employee-relations one.
Workers themselves certainly perceive it.
AARP's latest research found that 64% of US workers aged 50 and above reported seeing or experiencing age discrimination in the workplace. The high figure was unchanged from its previous wave of research. AARP
Hiring decisions are particularly difficult territory because rejection rarely comes with an explanation. A candidate who is told another applicant was a better fit usually has zero visibility into whether age, experience or assumptions about either influenced the decision.
Sometimes, however, changing what the employer can see produces revealing results...
When experience becomes something to hide
One of the stranger features of the current employment market is the growing amount of career advice telling experienced candidates to make themselves look less experienced.
Remove graduation dates. Cut the earliest jobs. Focus on the last ten or 15 years. Avoid giving away anything that discloses or hints at age unnecessarily. Absolutely, some of this is simply good CV housekeeping. Nobody necessarily needs an eight-page chronological account of every project completed since 1992. But there is a difference between removing irrelevant information and concealing relevant experience because a candidate fears it will reveal that they are older or over qualified.
Recent reporting has documented experienced candidates doing exactly that. In March 2026, the Irish Independent reported on older executives removing early employment and education dates from their CVs in an attempt to reduce age clues during recruitment. Independent
Academic research suggests those concerns are not imaginary. A 2017 experiment involving 610 HR professionals investigated both explicit and implicit age cues on résumés. Researchers found evidence of hiring discrimination against older applicants based on subtle age signals. Simply removing an explicit date of birth did not eliminate the effect. Frontiers
Other experimental research has found that appearance can matter too. In one study involving 264 HR professionals in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, older-looking candidates received lower hireability ratings for front-office roles because they were perceived as less fit, even when chronological age itself did not produce the same effect. Frontiers
All this creates an uncomfortable reversal. Workers can spend the first half of their careers trying to accumulate experience, only to reach a point where they begin hiding it from their CVs and next employer.
Are employers wrong to worry about older workers?
This is where the argument needs more care. Not every concern associated with an ageing workforce is evidence of discrimination.
Skills can become outdated. Technologies change. Some jobs place physical demands on workers that become harder with age. Salary structures can also mean that experienced employees cost more, particularly in occupations where pay traditionally increases with seniority.
The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 explicitly warns about some of these challenges.
Adults aged 60 to 65 demonstrate significantly lower average literacy and adaptive problem-solving skills than younger workers, according to OECD data. Training participation is also lower. Only around a third of 60 to 65-year-olds participated in training in 2023, compared with more than half of people aged 25 to 44. OECD
Technology therefore presents a real workforce-development question. If employees are expected to work for longer while the skills required by employers change more quickly, learning cannot stop at 30, 40 or 50.
Some occupations also need to be treated differently. The OECD notes that physical work can become more difficult with age, while the shift towards occupations where knowledge and experience matter can allow productivity to be sustained for longer. OECD
Employers are entitled to assess all of these things. What is harder to justify is using someone's age as a shortcut for assessing them. Or simply to automate them out of talent pipelines.
A 55-year-old candidate may have outdated technology skills. Another may be considerably more technologically capable than the 30-year-old interviewing them. One experienced executive may be unwilling to take a less senior position without becoming frustrated. Another may actively want fewer management responsibilities.
One candidate may expect a salary the organisation cannot afford. Another may happily accept the advertised salary. These are all recruitment questions with discoverable answers... and age alone does not answer them.
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What does experience actually buy an employer?
The assumption that older employees necessarily represent higher cost and declining productivity also runs into a problem: the productivity evidence does not fit neatly with it.
The OECD's work on older workers finds that employees aged 50 and above tend to remain highly productive and that age-diverse workforces can generate benefits beyond the output of individual employees.
Using linked employer-employee datasets from Costa Rica, Finland, Germany, Japan and Portugal, OECD researchers found that a company with a 10% higher share of workers aged 50 and above than the average firm was 1.1% more productive.
Approximately half of that increase was attributed to a direct effect and half to productivity-enhancing complementarities between younger and older workers. OECD
There was another useful finding. Employee turnover was 4% lower at firms with a 10% higher share of older workers than the average firm. Therefore more stable, not less. However, the OECD cautions that higher dismissal costs for longer-tenured employees may explain some of this, but not all of it. OECD
More recent OECD analysis continues to find evidence that employees can become more productive when working alongside colleagues from different age groups. OECD. This is an interesting one as experience is difficult to capture in a skills inventory and often gets overlooked.
An experienced employee may recognise warning signs because they have seen the problem before. Managers who have spent years dealing with difficult situations may be better equipped to know which problems require intervention and which will disappear without. Experienced specialists can carry institutional and professional knowledge that isn't documented in a process manual.
They can also pass some of that knowledge to other people.
None of this means that older automatically means better. Twenty-five years of experience is not necessarily 25 years of improvement. People can become extremely experienced at doing something badly. But that works both ways. Age is no more a reliable proxy for declining capability than it is for exceptional capability. Good recruitment has to assess the individual.
Can AI turn a hiring preference into a hiring system?
There is another reason this issue matters right now. Recruitment decisions are increasingly mediated by technology. Employers use applicant tracking systems, assessments, matching tools, ranking systems and AI-powered products to process applicant pools that would be too difficult for human recruiters to review manually.
This creates efficiency. It can also make the mechanics behind a rejection harder to see.
The ongoing US case Mobley v Workday has become an important test of that question.
The plaintiffs allege that Workday's algorithm-based applicant screening tools discriminate against applicants on the basis of characteristics including age, race and disability. In March 2026, a federal court allowed important parts of the case to continue, including disparate-impact claims relating to age. Justia Law
A subsequent amended complaint alleges that Workday's screening and selection features produce a statistically significant disparate impact against applicants aged 40 and above. Justia Law
Those are allegations, not findings that Workday's technology discriminates against older candidates. But the case raises a much broader question for employers using automated recruitment technology.
An algorithm does not necessarily need a field labelled "age" to encounter information associated with age. Graduation dates, length of career, job titles, years of experience and employment history can all provide clues about someone's likely age. Removing date of birth from an application therefore does not, by itself, demonstrate that a selection process is age-neutral.
There is also a scale issue. A biased human recruiter will also make biased decisions - be they conscious or not. An automated process capable of applying the same preference across hundreds of thousands of applications creates a different kind of risk.
Technology can certainly make recruitment more consistent. However, employers need to be very sure about what it is making more consistent.
The talent market cannot live entirely in the middle
This is where the problems facing younger and older candidates begin to connect.
Organisations need inexperienced people. They also need experienced people.
They need somewhere for one to become the other. If not at their academy or lower ranks, then someone else's.
For years, employers have complained about skills shortages while simultaneously asking for candidates who can arrive ready-made. Entry-level jobs asking for several years of experience became something of a recruitment cliché long before generative AI appeared. AI potentially pushes that joke even further.
If Claude can produce the first draft, complete the basic analysis, write straightforward code, handle routine customer queries or perform some of the administrative work previously assigned to junior employees, hiring fewer junior people makes total sense when viewed one role at a time.
But junior work has another function. It is where people learn. Today's senior accountant once did relatively basic accounting work. Today's creative director produced work that somebody else corrected. Today's head of talent acquisition once conducted interviews without having conducted a thousand previous interviews.
Expertise has to come from somewhere.
At exactly the same time, employers risk excluding some of the people who already possess it. That should concern organisations interested in succession planning, knowledge transfer and leadership development just as much as it concerns those interested in inclusion.
The OECD's evidence on age-diverse teams is useful here because it challenges the idea that employers should be deciding whether younger or older workers offer better value. In many workplaces, the best answer is probably... hire both.
The inexperienced employee brings recent learning, different perspectives, fresh energy, and the opportunity to develop. The experienced employee brings accumulated knowledge, judgement and context. Put them together effectively and the organisation gets something neither necessarily provides alone.
Strip both out of the workforce and you might be creating a worst of all worlds situation for yourself.
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TA needs to separate age from the things it actually wants to measure
For recruitment leaders, there is a fairly practical conclusion.
- If technological capability matters, assess technological capability.
- If adaptability matters, assess how candidates have adapted to change.
- If salary expectations matter, discuss salary.
If there is a genuine concern that an experienced candidate will leave because a role is less senior than their previous position, ask why they want it and explore their motivation. If stability and attrition are you concern, the experienced hire could well be the most stable options.
If current knowledge matters more than historical experience, design an assessment that establishes current knowledge.
These approaches require more thought than deciding that somebody looks overqualified or assuming a younger candidate will be more digitally capable. They are also more likely to tell an employer something useful.
Recruitment teams should apply the same scrutiny to the systems making or influencing those decisions. If an AI tool ranks candidates, employers need to understand what information contributes to that ranking, how outcomes differ between groups and whether apparently neutral variables are functioning as proxies for protected characteristics.
The employer brand implications are easy to overlook. Candidates generally do not care whether a discriminatory outcome originated with a hiring manager, an external assessment provider or an algorithm embedded in recruitment software. They applied to the employer. The reputational hits land the same either way.
How much experience is too much?
Experience has traditionally been one of the currencies of the labour market. Employers ask for it, candidates compete on it, and organisations spend considerable amounts of time and money helping people acquire it through graduate programmes, apprenticeships, mentoring, training and career development.
Which makes the current situation difficult to fathom. At one end of the market, young people are finding it harder to get the opportunities through which experience is built. At the other, some experienced workers are discovering that having too much of it can count against them, to the point that they are shortening CVs and disguising the length of their careers to improve their chances of being selected.
There are reasonable questions to ask of candidates at every stage of a career. A graduate with limited experience still has to demonstrate potential and the ability to learn. Someone with 30 years behind them still has to show that their skills are current, that they want the job on offer and that they can contribute to the organisation as it exists today. Experience should not provide a free pass any more than youth should.
But employers should be careful about turning those questions into assumptions about age. If a candidate is too expensive, establish their salary expectations. If their skills may be outdated, test them. If they appear overqualified, ask why they want the job. If adaptability matters, look for evidence of how they have handled change. Age is a remarkably crude way of answering questions that recruitment processes are perfectly capable of asking directly.
The wider issue is harder to solve. Employers cannot indefinitely reduce the opportunities through which people become experienced while simultaneously filtering out people because they appear to have accumulated too much experience.
Somewhere between the graduate struggling to get a first opportunity and the 55-year-old removing ten years from a CV sits the workforce employers say they want. The question is how anyone is supposed to get there.
Takeaways
1. Is AI reducing graduate and entry-level jobs?
There is growing evidence that AI is contributing to weaker hiring for young workers in some occupations, particularly where generative AI can perform tasks traditionally given to junior employees. AI is not the only factor behind falling graduate recruitment, but employers may need fewer entry-level hires as more routine work becomes automated.
2. Are older workers facing age discrimination in hiring?
Research and recent legal cases suggest age discrimination remains a significant recruitment issue. Experienced candidates can face assumptions that they are too expensive, overqualified, less adaptable or less technologically capable. The problem arises when employers infer those characteristics from age rather than assessing the individual candidate.
3. Why are experienced workers removing jobs and dates from their CVs?
Some older jobseekers are shortening their CVs, removing graduation dates and leaving out early career experience to reduce clues about their age. While trimming irrelevant experience can make a CV more focused, deliberately hiding relevant experience points to a wider concern that a long career can sometimes reduce a candidate's chances of progressing through recruitment.
4. Are older and more experienced workers less productive?
The evidence does not support a simple relationship between age and declining productivity. OECD research has found workers aged 50 and above can remain highly productive, while age-diverse teams can benefit from the combination of experience, institutional knowledge and complementary skills across generations.
5. Why should employers hire both younger and older workers?
Employers need junior workers who can develop into tomorrow's specialists and leaders, as well as experienced workers who bring judgement, knowledge and skills accumulated over a career. Reducing opportunities at both ends risks weakening succession, knowledge transfer and the future talent pipeline. Recruitment should assess capability, motivation and skills directly rather than using age or years of experience as a shortcut.
