Article
How to get your first job with no experience when AI is replacing entry-level jobs
Over the past few years I have interviewed hundreds of candidates for marketing specialist, advertising specialist and data analyst roles. I often invited beginners to interviews with a practical task: people who had only completed a course, had studied the subject, or had tried the work on a small project of their own. I saw in them the motivation to develop in the field.
Today everyone is talking about how artificial intelligence is replacing entry-level work, and the statistics confirm it: there are fewer and fewer job adverts for entry-level positions. Some people respond by using AI to send as many CVs as possible to as many vacancies as possible. This overwhelms HR, which cannot keep up with replying to candidates.
For a graduate, for someone looking for their first job, their first work experience in their field, the situation is far more difficult than in the past. And it will get worse.
How do you get your first job? How I got my first full-time job
A lot has changed since I started my first full-time job.
I will start with what helped my career a great deal. Already at primary school I tried building websites and programming, at a time when AI was not yet doing it for us. I built a website that worked as something between a forum and a social network. I tried to promote it through social media. It was something I really enjoyed, and something I saw potential to grow in. I did it long before I started my first full-time job.
When I think about it now, with some breaks, I have spent almost 20 years either developing a digital product or marketing it. When you are this immersed in something that has a future, whether or not it earns you money at the moment, you are in a dramatically better position than someone who is not. I am convinced of this.
Let us move on. I never got my first full-time job by responding to a job advert.
A fellow student asked me whether I could translate a few marketing texts into Slovak for him. Then his colleagues asked whether I would make them a newsletter on a barter basis. Along the way, after a few minutes of browsing their website, I found several shortcomings. Only then did we agree on a long-term collaboration, and I started doing performance marketing, this time for a salary. At first for a few hours a month, and gradually it became full-time.
That would not happen today. My fellow student would turn to AI for the translation, not to me. And AI would check the website for him in a few minutes too.
The small steps that moved me towards a job no longer exist, with one exception: choosing the right university, which I have written about.
Why are companies no longer hiring juniors? What can you do as a junior to gain an advantage?
What do companies need? They certainly need people who take ownership of the output: people who can delegate junior work to AI and robots, people who know what the right output should look like in the context of the company. You can read about this in one of my previous articles.
Many seniors and candidates for management positions also come to me for interviews. Even though they are often behind on AI, you can build on their seniority, on the fact that they know what the right output should look like in their industry. Juniors can ask AI about it, but they often trust it blindly and cannot judge whether it is hallucinating, because they have not spent enough time in that industry, either on their own or in previous jobs.
Their advantage can lie in having an open mind about making work more efficient with AI. Seniors very often lack this, as I have also written before.
Young people should make the most of the fact that they already have today's basic literacy, but they must realise that it is only the beginning. It is like being able to read and write in 2024: that alone will not get you a good job.
Juniors and graduates must learn to work with artificial intelligence properly
It is not just about writing a prompt, asking a question or setting a task. It is about knowing how to guide AI, giving it work in the right way, and to some extent understanding the problem that needs solving. In interviews I see what happens when someone works with AI superficially and delegates absolutely everything to it. They bring an output to the interview that was never theirs, and they cannot explain how they arrived at the solution. They do not know whether the task has been solved correctly.
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Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
How do you get your first job with no experience?
Is AI replacing entry-level jobs?
What does a junior need to do for a company to hire them?
What should young people learn in the age of AI?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
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