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 applicants are now chasing the same positions. That sounds like a story about fiercer competition, but what he added next was different in kind. It wasn't that getting hired would become harder — it was a warning that the jobs themselves would disappear.
His prediction that AI automation will 'dramatically' reduce entry-level roles wasn't a short-term forecast. It was closer to pointing at a change already in motion. The fact that the CEO of a company Next's size would say this publicly reads, inside the industry, as a signal that the direction is already settled. And it isn't only a problem for job seekers. Small business owners who need to hire and solo founders trying to build their first teams are standing in the middle of the same shift.
The Structure Hiding Behind the Numbers
Next is a major retailer operating more than 600 stores across the UK. Wolfson has led the company for over twenty years, and his words carry considerable weight in the retail industry. The figure he cited is not a routine hiring statistic. Twice as many people applying for the same position within just two years shows how quickly the supply-demand imbalance in the labor market is deepening.
There's a reason he pointed to structural change rather than an economic downturn. As AI begins handling the work that entry-level employees used to do — call center support, inventory management, logistics tracking, data entry — the very rationale for hiring and training newcomers is eroding. And when the jobs where people first learn the ropes disappear, the path to every rung above them narrows too.
South Korea is on a similar trajectory. Large companies have been scaling back their mass-recruitment programs for years, and smaller firms increasingly prefer experienced hires. According to 2023 data compiled by JobKorea and Albamon, two of Korea's largest job platforms, entry-level hiring had fallen to about 35 percent of total recruitment. The difficulty job seekers feel is not a personal shortfall — it is tied to a change in the hiring structure itself.
Is It the Economy, or the Technology?
Explaining all of this through AI automation alone is a stretch. There are credible counterarguments.
The surge in applicants likely overlaps with economic weakness. The UK went through a stretch in 2024 when real wage growth stalled and consumer sentiment contracted. In times like these, people put off changing jobs and concentrate their applications on stable, large employers. If twice as many people are chasing the same position, it may not be that the hiring bar rose — it may be that applicants have nowhere else to go.
The claim that AI is replacing entry-level work also still lives mostly in the realm of prediction. Call center automation and warehouse robotics are real, but cases where large-scale workforce reductions show up in hard numbers remain limited. The 'hundreds of millions of jobs lost' projections from McKinsey and the World Economic Forum swing widely depending on model assumptions. A CEO's remark captures where the industry believes things are headed — it is not confirmation of something that has already happened.
There is also the counterargument that AI automation creates new roles even as it eliminates others. AI operators, prompt designers, data reviewers, editors of AI output — these are job titles that did not exist two years ago. The question is whether these new jobs will generate demand on the same scale as the entry-level positions they displace. That remains unclear.
Even so, there is a reason Wolfson's warning cannot be brushed aside. The hiring structure may never return to its old shape, even after the economy recovers. Recessions are temporary, but investments in automation, once made, are hard to unwind.
It Looks Different From the Hiring Side
If you run a one-person business or manage a small team, this shift is worth reading from another angle. Twice as many applicants means, from the hiring side, a wider field to choose from. But there is a question to ask before anything else: does this role actually need a human?
Look at the job market through a recruiter's eyes and you can see exactly where candidates fall out. Far more often than résumé formatting, the failure point is that applicants cannot clearly communicate what they would actually be able to do in the role. The fiercer the competition, the wider that gap becomes.
Small business owners hiring entry-level staff often lean on standards like 'as long as they're diligent' or 'they'll learn and grow on the job.' How well do those hold up in an era of AI automation? Once AI takes over the mechanical, repetitive work, what remains for people is judgment, relationship management, exception handling, and problem solving. If you have to hire expecting those things from day one, the market starts to look different the moment you screen candidates by that standard.
The same goes for job seekers. As competition intensifies, the application strategy has to change. If large companies like Next are automating repetitive work with AI while still keeping people in certain areas, figuring out where those areas are — and preparing in ways suited to them — may be worth more than a hundred applications. Meeting the qualifications listed in a job posting and proving you would actually be useful in the role are different tasks from the starting line.
The doubling of applicants points not to the intensity of competition but to a shift in structure. The more meaningful question right now is not how many people are chasing a given job — it is which jobs will still exist at all.
