Lord Wolfson, the chief executive of Next—the British fashion retail giant—recently told the BBC something striking. Compared with two years ago, he said, the same job now draws twice as many applicants. That sounds like competition heating up, but what he added next had a different character. The point wasn't that getting hired had grown harder; it was a warning that the jobs themselves were about to disappear.
His claim that AI automation will ‘dramatically’ reduce entry-level positions wasn't a short-term forecast. It read more like a marker pointing to the direction of a shift already under way. The very fact that the head of a company the size of Next would say this publicly is read, within the industry, as a sign that the direction has already hardened. And this isn't only a problem for job seekers. The small-business owner who needs to hire, the solo founder who needs to build a team—they are in the middle of this change too.
The Structure Hidden Behind the Numbers
Next operates more than 600 stores across the UK, making it one of the country's largest retailers. Lord Wolfson has led the company for over two decades, and his words carry considerable weight in the retail trade. The figure he cited is not just a hiring statistic. The fact that twice as many people are now applying for the same position within the short span of two years shows how quickly the imbalance between supply and demand in the labor market is deepening.
There is a reason he pointed to structural change rather than blaming a downturn. As AI begins to handle the work that junior staff used to do—call-center responses, inventory management, logistics tracking, data entry—the very rationale for hiring and training newcomers is shrinking. When the positions where people first learn the job disappear, the path upward from there narrows along with them.
Korea is riding a similar current. The shrinking of large-company open recruitment (gongchae, the mass annual intake of new graduates) and the growing preference among small and mid-sized firms for experienced hires have been under way for several years now. According to data compiled by JobKorea and Albamon in 2023, the share of entry-level hiring has fallen to around 35 percent of the total. The difficulty job seekers feel isn't a shortfall in individual ability—it is bound up with a change in the hiring structure itself.
Is It the Economy, or the Technology?
It would be a stretch to explain all of this with AI automation alone. There is a clear case for skepticism, too.
The surge in applicants is very likely tied to the economic slump. In 2024, Britain went through a stretch in which real-wage growth stalled and consumer confidence weakened. In times like these, people tend to put off changing jobs and concentrate their applications on stable, large employers. If twice as many people piled into the same position, it may not be that hiring standards rose—it may be that applicants had nowhere else to go.
The claim that AI is replacing entry-level work also still belongs largely to the realm of prediction. It's true that call-center automation and the rollout of logistics robots are advancing, but the cases in which large-scale workforce cuts have actually been confirmed in the numbers are limited. The ‘hundreds of millions of jobs lost’ projections from McKinsey and the World Economic Forum vary enormously depending on the assumptions built into the models. The CEO's remarks point to where the industry is heading; they are not confirmation of something that has already happened.
There is also the counterargument that AI automation creates new roles even as it eliminates particular ones. AI operators, prompt designers, data reviewers, editors of AI output—these are titles that didn't exist two years ago. The question is whether these new jobs will generate demand on the same scale as the entry-level roles they replace. On that point, things remain unclear.
Even so, there is a reason Lord Wolfson's remarks can't be brushed aside. The hiring structure may not return to what it was, even after the economy recovers. A downturn is temporary, but once investment in automation has been made, it is hard to undo.
It Looks Different from the Hiring Side
If you're a sole proprietor or run a small team, you need to read this change from a different angle. The fact that applicants have doubled also means that, for those doing the hiring, the range of choices has widened. But there is a question to settle first: “Does a person need to do this role at all?”
Look at the job market through a hiring manager's eyes and you start to see where candidates fall out of the running. Examine those drop-off points, and far more often than the format of a résumé, the issue is that applicants fail to convey clearly what they can actually do in the role. The fiercer the competition, the wider this gap grows.
How well do the standards small-business owners commonly fall back on when hiring junior staff—“as long as they're diligent,” “they'll grow as they learn”—hold up in an age of AI automation? Once AI starts handling mechanical, repetitive tasks, what's left for people is judgment, managing relationships, handling exceptions, solving problems. If you have to hire with those expectations from the start, the market begins to look different the moment you assess applicants by that standard.
The same goes from the job seeker's side. The more competition intensifies, the more you have to change your application strategy. If a large company like Next is automating repetitive work with AI while still keeping people in certain areas, figuring out where those areas are and preparing in a way that fits them can be worth more than 100 submitted applications. Meeting the qualifications listed in a job posting and proving that you are genuinely useful in the role are, from the very outset, two different undertakings.
The number—twice as many applicants—points not to the intensity of competition but to a shift in structure. More meaningful than asking how many people are crowding into a given position is asking, first, which positions will still exist at all in the years ahead.
