Lord Wolfson, chief executive of the British fashion retail giant Next, said something striking in a recent BBC interview. Compared with two years ago, twice as many people are now applying for the same positions. It sounds like a simple case of competition heating up—but what he said next had a different character altogether. The point wasn't that landing a job had grown harder. It was a warning that the jobs themselves are about to disappear.
His claim that AI automation would 'dramatically' reduce entry-level roles wasn't a short-term forecast. It read more like a pointer to a shift already underway. The very fact that the CEO of a company Next's size would say such a thing publicly is read, within the industry, as a signal that the direction has already hardened. This isn't only a problem for job seekers. The small-business owner who needs to make a hire, and the solo founder who needs to build a team, are right in the middle of this change too.
The Structure Hiding Behind the Numbers
Next is a major UK retailer with more than 600 stores. Lord Wolfson has led the company for over two decades, and his words carry considerable weight in the retail sector. The figure he cited is not a simple hiring statistic. The fact that twice as many people are applying for the same position within the span of just two years shows how quickly the supply-and-demand imbalance in the labor market is deepening.
There's a reason he pointed to structural change rather than to a downturn. As AI begins to handle the tasks that junior staff used to do—call-center support, inventory management, logistics tracking, data entry—the very reason to hire and train newcomers is fading. When the entry-level positions where people first learn the work vanish, the paths that lead up from them narrow as well.
Korea sits on a similar current. Shrinking open-recruitment intakes at large conglomerates and the growing preference for experienced hires among smaller firms have been the trend for several years now. According to data compiled in 2023 by JobKorea and Albamon, two of Korea's largest job-listing platforms, the share of entry-level hires has fallen to around 35 percent of the total. The difficulty job seekers feel isn't a matter of individual shortcomings—it's tied to a change in the hiring structure itself.
Is It the Economy, or the Technology?
It would be a stretch to explain this phenomenon by AI automation alone. There are clear reasons to be skeptical.
The surge in applicants is very likely tied to the economic slowdown. In 2024, the UK went through a stretch where 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 role, it may not be that hiring bars rose—it may be that applicants simply had nowhere else to go.
The claim that AI is replacing entry-level roles also still belongs largely to the realm of prediction. It's true that call-center automation and warehouse robotics are advancing, but cases where large-scale workforce cuts have been confirmed in the numbers remain limited. The 'hundreds of millions of jobs lost' projections from McKinsey and the World Economic Forum yield wildly different results depending on the model's assumptions. The CEO's remarks identify the industry's direction of travel; they are not confirmation of a reality that has already arrived.
There's also the counterargument that AI automation creates new roles even as it eliminates specific ones. Titles like AI operator, prompt designer, data validator, and AI-output editor didn't exist two years ago. The question is whether these new jobs will generate demand on the same scale as the entry-level positions they replace. On that point, the picture is still unclear.
And yet there's a reason Lord Wolfson's comments can't be brushed aside. Even after the economy recovers, the hiring structure may not return to what it was. A downturn is temporary, but once an investment in automation equipment is made, it's hard to undo.
It Looks Different From the Hiring Side
If you're a sole proprietor or running a small team, you need to read this shift from a different angle. The fact that the applicant pool has doubled also means that, for the person doing the hiring, the range of choices has widened. But at this point there's a question to settle first: 'Does this role need a human 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 you'll find that, far more often than résumé formatting, the issue is that applicants fail to convey clearly what they can actually do in the role. The fiercer the competition, the wider that gap grows.
The criteria small employers commonly lean on when hiring junior staff—'as long as they're diligent,' 'they'll grow as they learn'—how well do they hold up in an age of AI automation? Once AI starts handling the mechanical, repetitive work, what's left for people is judgment, relationship management, handling exceptions, and problem-solving. If you have to hire with those expectations from day one, then the moment you start sizing up applicants by that standard, the market begins to look different.
The same is true from the job seeker's side. As competition intensifies, the application strategy has to change. If a large company like Next automates repetitive work with AI while still keeping people in certain areas, figuring out where those areas are and preparing accordingly can be worth more than a hundred submitted applications. Meeting the qualifications listed in a job posting and proving you're someone genuinely useful in the role are, from the very outset, two different tasks.
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. That's the more worthwhile question to put at this moment.
