OpenAI Gets Into Job Placement While The Job Market Crashes

OpenAI, the company that’s disrupting the job market, has decided to get into job matching and placement. They call it The Open AI Jobs Platform, and its designed to provide economic opportunity for all.

Interestingly, this is the same language LinkedIn used in March of 2008 when they launched LinkedIn Recruiter. later acquiring Lynda.com to build LinkedIn Learning. In 2008 the workforce challenge was “digital skills.” Today it’s all about AI.

OpenAI’s Jobs Platform has two parts: job search and employee development. They discussed a series of AI certification programs designed to help employees learn AI skills (and move to what we call Superworker status).

“Now we’re … offering certifications for different levels of AI fluency, from the basics of using AI at work to AI-custom jobs and prompt engineering. We’ll use AI to teach AI: anyone will be able to prepare for the certification in ChatGPT’s Study mode and become certified without leaving the app.” – Fidji Simo, head of Applications at OpenAI

OpenAI plans to build a system where employers can search for AI skills and presumably hire people.

In its initial launch OpenAI mentions partnerships with Indeed, Accenture, Walmart, John Deere, BCG, and the State of Texas. These are organizations that either need AI skills, sell AI skills, or help companies find AI skills.

It all sounds great, but as I discuss below, it’s trickier than it looks.

In the meantime, the job market continues to collapse.

The Job Market Isn’t Healthy

This week we discovered that the US job market is almost stagnant (only 22,000 jobs created in August after only 73,000 in July). Given we have around 160 million working people in the US, that’s job growth of around one tenth of one percent.

This is the lowest level of job growth since the pandemic: for the first time in decades there are more people looking for work than there are jobs. Not exactly the robust economy we hear about from Washington.

Why the slowdown?

Two reasons. First, companies are betting that AI will improve productivity. So there’s a massive transformation taking place to freeze and reduce headcount.

The second reason is that US tariff policy is causing uncertainty. So virtually every company we talk with is cutting labor cost.

I’d like to make a few comments on this activity, and also give you my perspectives on OpenAI’s entry into recruitment.

Yes, The Job Market Is Crashing, But It’s Also Reinventing Itself

There is a white collar recession going on.Not only are companies reluctant to hire, people are nervous about their AI skills so there is a lot of fear and uncertainty in the job market.

We call this the Superworker effect: AI automates many tasks and analytical activities, forcing individuals to upskill themselves to stay current. Those who fail to adapt find themselves out of work.

For businesses this is a bonanza: productivity goes up and hopefully costs stay flat. (It’s not as simple as it sounds: AI systems are not free and it takes time for the AI re-engineering to pay off.)

For job seekers, it means you’re fishing in a pond where expectations are high. Employers want AI-ready workers.

In our case, we now use our own AI tools to build courses and content for Galileo Learn and we’ve seen a five-fold increase in speed, quality, and user experience. Traditional instructional designers are being automated away

(Check out Galileo Learn if you want to see world-class AI-native L&D with 400+ dynamic courses in action, btw.)

For companies, it’s re-engineering time.

Companies like Micron, J&J, Walmart, IBM, and many others are redesigning business functions and it’s complex. AI transformation creates lots of AI data management issues and changes in job design (we call it “dynamic organization design”). This requires oversight and doesn’t happen overnight.

Over time, however, as I discussed with Taylor Stockton, Chief Innovation Officer at US Department of Labor (podcast), new jobs are created and companies grow on a new productivity curve.

But wait, there’s more. Why isn’t unemployment skyrocketing? Simple answer: we also have a growing shortage of workers.

Fewer people are being born; many boomers have retired; and immigration has halted. This creates a job market where fewer people compete for available jobs, keeping the unemployment rate low.

It’s not true in all sectors, however. Today 70% of US jobs are in front-line, service, transportation, healthcare, or other “mixed collar” roles. In these segments the hiring market is hot, and that includes jobs in manufacturing, logistics, hospitality, and many other industries. Here companies can’t find people fast enough.

This demographic drought will continue.

BLS analysis predicts that over the next ten years the US workforce will only grow by 3.1%. This is 75% less growth than the 13% workforce growth we experienced over the last decade. So one could argue that productivity and AI are here just in time.

You can already see the unemployment rate ticking up, despite the lack of job growth.

What Jobs Are Being Created? A Major Transformation in Jobs Themselves

The next trend is the huge transformation in jobs themselves, and this impacts careers, wages, and your skills. As with the digital transformation, people with top skills will be in demand while others will fall short. And the structure of jobs is changing.

Our Superworker research shows how AI-enabled jobs will no longer be “collection of tasks” or “set of processes.” Each job becomes bigger, potentially commanding higher pay. In other words, we’re all becoming “AI-powered.”

Look at the steep growth cure for “prompt engineering” in all job descriptions. (Maybe prompt engineering will become as important as “Microsoft Office” as a skill.)

If you were a “video editor” you’re now an AI-powered “video producer.” Editing the video is done by machine: it’s up to you to think through the storyline, the timing, select music, and make the whole thing “sing.”

The same is happening in HR jobs (HR business partners, recruiters, call center agents), Marketing (content creation, copywriting, lead generation), Publishing (writers, authors), and all areas of Finance and Administration.

This broader “accountability-based” job design is what we advise companies to do as they consider task automation. You can task-reduce a job and redefine what someone does, but every few months the AI tool gets smarter, so the “task-list” keeps changing. In many ways, employees are now “managing” the agent.

This used to be called “Job Crafting,” letting each person decide how best to do their work. Now we’re doing job crafting at scale, expecting every individual to figure out how to do their work more productively.

And to enable this productivity gain we need to enable, empower, and educate people about AI. And that’s what OpenAI is trying to do.

Can OpenAI Pull Job Matching This Off?

I’ve been studying HR Technology for 30+ years and many companies have tried to solve the matching problem between employers and job-seekers. Google Jobs was one effort, and even Facebook gave it a try. It turns out it’s quite complex and OpenAI will have a lot of work to do.

First, OpenAI has to amass a huge amount of job candidate data (that’s every working-age person in the world). That alone is a massive effort – buying data (listen to my podcast on the People Data Market for more) – and then they have to infer skills, experience, potential, and much more.

All that AI-powered effort has been underway at LinkedIn, Eightfold, Lightcast, Draup, Seekout, Indeed, Ziprecruiter, Beamery, SAP, Workday, and hundreds of others. And what you find is that the sheer size and scale of the problem is daunting. Seekout and Eightfold are very good at finding technical people. Draup can find you bio-medical researchers and robotics engineers. And Indeed can help you find nurses.

Second, OpenAI has to build an “applicant tracking system” (ATS) that helps employers find candidates. Gig work platforms like Upwork, Toptal, Fiverr, and many others have been doing this for years, and the business model is weak (who pays for what?), so they tend to become work-management tools. I’m not sure if this is what OpenAI wants to do.

For employers, this type of system has to deal with bias, trust, and validity – themes which they’ve been able to more or less ignore so far. So even if it is a “talent matching” tool, buyers of talent acquisition systems are sophisticated, demanding companies, so they push for HCM integrations and many workflow features. This is why Google and Meta abandoned the idea.

We’ll stay close to them and share what we learn, but I can guarantee that Workday, SAP, (both of whom just acquired talent acquisition companies), Oracle, and all the vendors above are not sitting still. So this may be one of the “good ideas” at OpenAI that demands more product management than they realize. But my mind is open.

AI Agents as Learning Tools

And this gets me to my final point, and maybe the most exciting of all (also mentioned in OpenAI’s announcement) is employee development. Let’s use AI to learn about AI.

We call this AI Agents as Professional Development Tools.

As we detail in our Revolution in Corporate Learning research, given the dynamics above, companies need to shift from “job-centric training” to “dynamic self-development” for employees. If the job tasks keep changing, employees have to learn even faster.

Agent-based learning platforms like Galileo Learn, (which now has more than 30,000 users), go way beyond courseware. They become your personal AI Tutor, answering questions and challenging you every day.

We are two years into this effort we’ve seen it in reality. When you combine the power of a trusted agent with credential-quality training, interactivity, simulation, and role play, the learning experience becomes magical. This is our vision for Galileo Learn, and we’re delivering it today.

OpenAI clearly wants to go in this direction, so let’s hope they help us all revolutionize corporate L&D.

We all need a 24/7 learning tutor that knows what we need to learn, teaches us, and coaches us for success. This is how AI will best deliver career success, self-confidence, and economic growth in the future.

Additional Information

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