Verizon's Jason McKean: "Where will we find mid-level talent once senior executives disappear?
The shift towards hiring senior talent over juniors risks creating a leadership gap, impacting long-term growth and innovation as fewer mid-level leaders emerge from within the organization.
By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. News Brief,
Every senior designer on your team started as a bet. Someone read a thin portfolio and decided to spend a year teaching. That bet is getting rare, and it is not because of layoffs. It is because leaders keep writing the next role one level higher. Let me catch you up on why that quiet math is going to cost you, and what to do this quarter.
The deep cut
- A closed pipeline is a stack of your own requisitions. Nobody at 285,000 U.S. firms announced they stopped hiring juniors; the reqs just crept up a level.
- A function that can't grow leaders gets rented. John Gleason found 39% of 243 Fortune 500 companies cut or downgraded their top design roles.
- Taste without conviction is pub talk. David Bailey bet on his own judgment on a freezing Manhattan bridge before anyone agreed with him.
The decision nobody remembers making
No leader stood up and said the company was done with juniors. It happened one requisition at a time, each written a notch higher than the last. Economists tracking 62 million workers at 285,000 U.S. firms found that after firms adopted generative AI, junior hiring fell while senior hiring held steady. The drop came through slower hiring, not layoffs, so it never felt like a crisis inside any one team.
That is the trap. A layoff forces a meeting, and a meeting forces an owner. A req that skips the junior level forces nothing. The numbers back it up: Figma reports 56% of hiring managers see rising demand for seniors against 25% for juniors. Pull your last five reqs and count how many were entry level. That count is your pipeline.
The bill comes due in five years
Verizon's ECD Jason McKean asked the question out loud in MikeTeevee's Brand Perspectives report: "If you can't start at the entry level to get to the mid-level because it's been eaten up by AI, where will we find mid-level talent once today's senior executives disappear?" The junior you don't hire this year is the creative director you can't hire in a decade.
There is a second casualty: your own function. Consultant John Gleason reviewed 243 Fortune 500 companies and found 39% had cut the top design levels or downgraded the head of design's title. Finance grooms controllers. Engineering promotes from inside. Design often has one head, a few seniors bought from outside, and nobody in between ready for the chair. A team that can't grow its own leaders looks rentable.
Own the fear, then hire against it
Most of this is not strategy, it is fear. A senior hire is defensible in any review. A junior who stumbles is a mistake with your name on it. Peter Merholz recalls a director who opened only senior reqs and said flatly, "I don't have time to manage people." That director left nobody ready to replace him.
Baseball solved this a century ago. When the St. Louis Cardinals kept losing bidding wars for stars, Branch Rickey stopped bidding, bought minor league teams, and taught the same fundamentals at every level. His clubs won nine pennants on players he developed. Hiring only seniors is a bet that some other company keeps training them. Put it in one line your finance partner can repeat: grow no one this year, and you buy seniors at a premium in 2029, right alongside your competitors.
The new hire knows the tool better than you
AI flipped who walks in fluent. Pew found workers 18 to 29 are the likeliest to use chatbots at work. Microsoft and LinkedIn report 71% of leaders would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a seasoned one without them. In one study of 5,179 support agents, novices improved 34% while veterans barely moved. The tools shrink the time it takes a beginner to be useful.
Fluency is not judgment. Cheaper making creates more work that needs judging, and that judging is exactly the skill juniors have to learn next. But they learn it beside a senior, not alone. Ethan Mollick warns that each time we hand work to the machine, "we lose a chance to develop our own expertise." A junior alone learns to accept the output. A junior next to a senior learns to question it.
Taste is not the moat you think
There is a comforting story going around that taste is what AI can't replace. James Martin pushes back: taste by itself doesn't do anything. Plenty of people with great taste spend their lives recognizing good work and doing nothing with it. The advantage is conviction under uncertainty, the nerve to bet on your judgment before anyone agrees.
That nerve is what you are training in a junior, and what AI is eroding when it hands teams infinite options. HelloFresh's James Hurst sees creatives who "run a double diamond design process and have a thousand people voting on their idea," then disown the result. When everyone can make anything, someone has to make the call and stand behind it. That is a taught skill, and it dies if the pipeline that teaches it stays closed.
Three questions for your team
- Of your last five requisitions, how many were written at the entry level, and who owns the ones that were not?
- Name who on your team could step up a level within a year. If you can't, what does that say about your bench and your own succession?
- Where in your current projects is a junior working alone with an AI tool, and which senior is sitting beside them to teach judgment instead of acceptance?
