Why Hungry Juniors Are Beating Seasoned Corporates in the Agentic Hiring Race

Hiring juniors is surprisingly on the rise, following 15 calls over the last 2 weeks with founders, investors, HR managers, and directors in tech firms.

One would expect that mass layoffs and job cuts will result in a vast employment pool.

This is partially right. But is this the right employment pool?

An old saying states that you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Putting discrimination aside, the agentic/LLM adoption over the past 3 years has vastly accelerated… everything. Prototyping, outreach, content at scale, interviews, selection cycles, onboarding, iterating and debugging.

The pace of releasing new models or agentic tools or SDKs or MCPs is ridiculous. One model may be a winner for 2 weeks and then number 5 on the chart, with top players breathing down each other’s necks.

Therefore, this has accelerated progress and adoption by 3x to 10x in more progressive industries. Applying this to the skills gap, a year or two in corporate using legacy technology and playbooks is now the equivalent of lagging 5+ years behind in 2010 terms.

It’s like teaching social media to someone who hasn’t been online over the past 10 years, and explaining the 101s of following, connections, commenting etiquette, the dangers of spam and phishing, and more. If you have kids, this analogy certainly rings true.

And applicants that still need to catch up on how modern organizations work, after 3+ years of heavy LLM and agentic adoption – this mental shift involves tooling, systems, principles, prompting, evals, new playbooks, new distributions of teams, new concepts of velocity (how you do the work), redefining ICs, smaller teams managing agents, documentation that’s promptable, and so. much. more.

This isn’t ageism in its pure form, and we don’t shy from hiring experts in their 50s either. But we’ve also been in this realm of hiring young and hungry college students or recent graduates in the 2010s, hacking at night, building pet projects, sitting on long workshops and hackathons. Similarly for marketers running their blogs and chasing coupons and discounts for $50 or $100 ad spend to carefully test paid media campaigns. Or free trials for content generation tools for affiliate networks. Or $1/mo hosting plans.

This aptitude to learning has also been lost in the bootcamp years of the hockey stick of IT. Expecting to spend 4-6 weeks in a private class learning computer science 101 and landing a job was a reality for tens of thousands of people.

Now, layoffs impact corporate workers and the steep job requirements make entry-level jobs impossible. Yet a handful of businesses keep hiring young people with a year of experience running some campaigns, or doing some vibe coding, and showing PASSION for the industry.

Hard work and curiosity will always be in fashion.