• 2025 is expected to be a robust year for mergers and acquisitions, and IPOs.
• Consequently, some investment banks are bulking up on hiring, industry recruiters say.
• Here's a look at which firms are staffing up and what sectors are seeing the most action.

When John Weinberg, the chairman and CEO of the elite boutique investment bank Evercore, sat down for a fireside chat in December at an annual Goldman Sachs conference, he revealed that his firm has been ramping up hiring.

"Most of the time, you don't really do much recruiting in November or December," he told listeners — but this year has been different. "If you could see my schedule, you'd see that virtually every day I am speaking with and recruiting" new talent, he said. "You could probably anticipate that our recruiting efforts will increase, not decrease."

Weinberg isn't the only Wall Street dealmaker for whom recruiting is top of mind. According to industry headhunters, hiring across the Street is expected to gain steam as 2025 gets underway. One headhunter said he's been so flooded with mandates as the end of the year approaches that his pipeline of work is up by as much as 70% over normal levels at this point in the year.

"We're probably up 60% to 70%," Kevin Mahoney, managing partner in the global financial-services practice at Christoph Zeiss Partners, told Business Insider. Next year is going to be "bonkers" in terms of hiring volumes, he said, adding: "We haven't been this busy in a long time."

After several years of lackluster deal activity, Wall Street is finally starting to see signs of a thaw in mergers and public offerings. A cocktail of lower interest rates, pent-up demand, and expectations for a friendlier landscape under Trump has left many dealmakers across the Street feeling bullish about the 2025 prospects for 2025. Robert Stowe, head of Americas equity capital markets at Barclays, told BI that he predicts some $50 billion in IPO volumes in the US next year. That would be a roughly 20% increase from 2024's just over $41 billion worth of IPO volumes in the Americas, as recorded by the deal-tracking firm Dealogic.

BI got an update on the latest investment-banking hiring trends from three top Wall Street headhunters: Mahoney; Meridith Dennes, managing director of recruiting at the firm Prospect Rock; and Brianne Sterling, head of the investment-banking recruiting practice at Selby Jennings.

Dennes said the industry's "musical chairs" will start to spike around January or February after bankers have received their bonuses. Many, she said, have gotten early hints about their bonus numbers this year and are privately grumbling.

"Bonuses are not coming out as strong as we expected them to be, and I think the reason is because there's been so much hiring at the senior level and at the MD level," she explained. "A lot of that compensation pool may be spoken for."

So, with moves on the way, which sectors will see the most activity? Here are a few key trends the headhunters say are worth watching in 2025.

The hot sectors

Banks big and small are already dialing up recruiting for their technology, media, and telecommunications teams, known as TMT in Wall Street parlance.

One reason, Mahoney said, is that those sectors are popular acquisition targets for financial sponsors. Indeed, private-equity firms are itching to deploy the billions they've raised from limited partners, but have been waiting for interest rates to decline.

"Something that I think will be interesting within the tech space, as well, is how teams are looking at staffing and positioning" for AI deals, as well as deals for cryptocurrency and digital-assets companies that may consolidate over the next year, Sterling of Selby Jennings said.

Tech has been a major area for banker movement, said Dennes, who also named healthcare, restructuring, industrials, consumer retail, and financial institutions (FIG) as hot. According to some of the early findings of her firm Prospect Rock's annual compensation survey, bankers in tech and restructuring displayed the highest levels of dissatisfaction with pay.

"Now, if they're not really paid," Dennes said, "they're going to want to jump — and there's opportunity for those folks to jump."

Tech dealmakers on the move

Union Square Advisors, a boutique technology-focused investment bank based in San Francisco, has onboarded a series of dealmakers recently, including tapping managing director Terry Jackson who previously worked at JPMorgan and Bank of America Securities. The firm also hired Todd Meadow to pitch in with sponsor coverage and brought on the banker Chris Appaneal to focus on software for governance, risk, and compliance.

Houlihan Lokey, a midsize firm long respected for its prowess in restructuring and distressed deals, has also been growing its wallet share in tech to win competitive M&A mandates.

This spring, the bank appointed Ryan Lund as co-head of US technology. It's been deepening the granularity of its software coverage with subsequent hires, as well — like Nana Kyei, a managing director who joined from Jefferies this fall and focuses on education tech. Geoff Rhizor joined the tech team in San Francisco in late summer; his coverage, in part, intersects with the fintech group's.

Barclays has also emphasized hiring managing directors focused on tech and healthcare deals, a company spokesperson told BI. Rob Patterson, who serves as head of data and information platforms coverage within tech investment banking, came over from Morgan Stanley. And the bank appointed David King, a former top-level banker at Bank of America, as global head of technology mergers and acquisitions this summer.

Big banks are staffing up

Some banks have already initiated widespread recruiting plans for juniors.

JPMorgan Chase, for instance, was engaged in a vigorous off-cycle recruiting spree for junior investment bankers as deal flow picked up speed this fall, according to industry sources and postings on its job board, as BI previously reported.

Goldman Sachs' careers portal recently displayed roughly a dozen openings for junior bankers in New York, San Francisco, and London. Vacancies included analyst and associate positions in coverage groups like financial institutions, entertainment banking, TMT, and industrials, as well as product-focused functions like equity capital markets.

Bankers need fresh blood: 'Send them our way'

The last time there was an M&A boom during the pandemic, many banks were caught unprepared and understaffed, resulting in complaints from overworked junior bankers.

This time, Wall Street employers say they won't make the same mistake twice — and many are eyeing boosting their junior ranks in preparation, the recruiters said.

Dennes expects an emphasis on associates and mid-level vice presidents to help juggle the ins and outs of executing the manifold deals coming down the pike. "Experienced bankers are always in demand," she said. "Anyone who has closed a couple of deals and is able to train junior staff is very valuable."

Dennes' firm, Prospect Rock, is currently working on filling four analyst roles, six associate roles, and two VP roles, postings on its website showed. Still, she doesn't see 2025 hiring following the same frenetic pattern it did during the pandemic-era M&A boom.

"In 2021, you just needed bodies — more horsepower. This is very different," she said. Now, banks are markedly more vigilant in emphasizing quality over quantity. "Nobody wants a 2021, 2022 redo," she added. "A lot of those hires were not strong."

Some senior dealmakers are already worried about short-staffing. A managing director at a Wall Street bank told BI he was confident that 2025 would deliver a volume of work comparable with 2021 levels, if perhaps not the same soaring valuations.

"Part of the conversation that we're going to have to think through is augmenting the team at the mid-level" to handle execution, he said. In this hiring market, though, "it's almost impossible" to find impressive associates or VPs, he cautioned. "Send them our way — because it's hard."

Are you an investment-banking insider or do you have knowledge of industry moves on Wall Street? Get in touch with these reporters. Reed Alexander can be reached via email at [email protected] or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at 561-247-5758. Emmalyse Brownstein can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at 305-857-5516.

• VCs are increasingly looking for candidates with deep technical expertise, especially in AI.
• Increasingly, VCs square off with the hottest AI companies to secure top talent.
• VC firms can't compete with companies like OpenAI on compensation.

Matt Hoffman, head of talent at M13, an early-stage venture firm, is preparing to hire a new junior investor sometime next year. As recently as a year ago, he would have sought out someone from a top business school or consulting firm. Now, he wants someone with deep technical expertise.

"The technology is just getting really sophisticated," Hoffman said. "You need to have enough sophistication to be able to understand the tech you are assessing."

As venture firms struggle to raise new funds, they have been hiring fewer roles and even shedding staff. On rarer occasions when they are hiring, they are increasingly seeking out candidates with deep domain expertise, especially in artificial intelligence.

"We certainly noticed it in the past 3 to 6 months, and like a lot of VC, once it kind of takes momentum, it snowballs, and all the other VCs are doing it," Hoffman said. "The traditional MBA background will not be sufficient for the best investors going forward."

Evaluating previous generations of startups required less sophistication, according to Deedy Das, who this year was hired as a principal at Menlo Ventures, which backs OpenAI rival Anthropic. He previously worked for nearly a decade in senior engineering roles at Facebook, Google, and Glean, a buzzy AI-powered search startup valued at $4.6 billion.

"To understand Facebook, you don't need to be technical to get it," Das said. "You know people go online to use an app and connect with their friends. You can see how it can make money. For AI, if I tell you I have the best model in the world, how are you, as a non-technical person, going to call my BS on that?"

Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, says he wants to hire "younger people who are more natively growing up with AI and think about AI as less of a novelty and more of just a sort of inevitability."

Hiring for the investing theme du jour

Mark Suster, a partner at Upfront Ventures, says he used to recruit from blue-chip consulting firms like McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company, whereas recent hires have all brought specific expertise in areas the firm wants to focus on.

"I don't think generalist works anymore because venture capital is too competitive now," said Suster.

"We're going much deeper in our industries, and so when we went to invest in healthcare, we hired a healthcare expert. Now that we're doing more semiconductors, we're trying to get somebody with semiconductor experience. We're doing more with satellites, so we want someone from day one who understands the customer and the technology."

Upfront is currently hiring for an investment associate focused on machine learning and AI.

Last year, Khosla Ventures hired John Chu as a partner, who held senior engineering roles at Meta and Opendoor. This fall, Katie Jacobs Stanton, a longtime Twitter insider turned venture capitalist, hired a former engineering leader to her firm, Moxxie Ventures.

Ashwin Lalendran worked on drones at the Air Force Research Laboratory, shipped 3D vision software for Apple's mapping and self-driving-car projects, and led a team of engineers to scale the world's largest private-owned network of ocean sensors at Sofar Ocean.

He joins Moxxie's deep bench of operators to assist with sourcing, evaluating, and closing deals in deep tech, hardware, and national security, areas where Moxxie has deepened its focus over the past year.

Firms have long hired from certain networks based on the investment theme du jour, according to Yoni Rechtman, a principal at Slow Ventures, an early investor in Robinhood and PillPack.

During the fintech boom, Stripe was the hot ticket, and investors rushed to hire from the fintech giant.

Today, firms are chasing after ex-Palantir and OpenAI employees to fill out their ranks — some of them are restaffing after years of hiring slowdowns or job cuts, though such moves remain rare in the venture industry — and to add expertise and networks in their fields of interest.

Slow Ventures is looking to add as many as four associates over the next year based on the quality of talent on the market, Rechtman said. Being technical as an associate is a plus but not a requirement, though. "Being credible with founders because you worked at OpenAI is great," Rechtman said, "but doesn't necessarily mean much for your ability to pick stocks well."

VC firms can't compete with startups on compensation

Increasingly, venture firms find themselves squaring off with the hottest AI companies to secure top talent, according to Dan Miller, a recruiter and partner at True Search. "For a lot of VC firms, the stiffest competition for talent over the last year has been OpenAI," said Miller.

He's worked with several venture firms on partner and principal searches that lost candidates to the ChatGPT-maker. That is largely because OpenAI offers salaries above market rate and a chance to contribute to cutting-edge research and development. Those candidates, in turn, gain experience that opens doors to top-tier venture firms down the line, Miller added.

The average salary for a VC with 1-3 years of experience is $264,000, according to Glassdoor, an anonymous job review site. By contrast, OpenAI's median yearly total compensation is $534,197, according to Levels.fyi, which tracks compensation data at tech firms and startups.

"No VC will pay what a good AI engineer can make a company," said M13's Hoffman. "So our job is to find people who get excited about working in venture and helping to build a number of companies rather than just one."

Das said he did take a step down in pay when he joined Menlo Ventures after Glean, "but I wasn't concerned because if this worked, it would be a long-term bet where the comp would be fine," Das said.

He explained that he was excited to try venture because he was ready for a new challenge and also thought his technical chops would give him an edge over generalist investors evaluating AI infrastructure and machine learning deals.

"I thought a lot of venture capitalists were actually pretty terrible doing diligence on companies that were technical because they weren't technical."

Das was recently on a call with co-investors, and they needed his expertise. They were stumped and needed help understanding some of the jargon the founder of an AI startup was using.

"I chuckled because every second pitch I see is some version of fancy technical lingo, which actually doesn't mean much if you dig into it," Das said. "That's something a traditional investor has a really hard time seeing through."

• One of the biggest parts of preparing for a job interview is running through practice questions.
• We asked recruiting pros for their top interview questions and how a candidate should answer them.
• Here's what they told us.

When you're preparing for a job interview, one of the first things you can do is research what previous candidates have shared about their own interviews with that employer. Some of the most helpful information to glean, if you can find it, is what interview questions you might expect to be asked.

To help job seekers who might not be able to find common questions asked by a specific company, we asked five recruiting professionals for their favorite questions to ask in job interviews.

They also broke down how candidates should answer and what the answers can reveal about them. Of course, the slate of questions asked in an interview can vary based on the recruiter's personal preferences, the role, and other factors — but these go-to questions from recruiters are a good place to start.

Here's a look at questions recruiters love to ask that they say can be particularly telling about a candidate.

'Tell me a time when you found a way to improve a process, made something more efficient, or otherwise introduced an improvement when you weren't asked to do so.'

Kyle Samuels, who spent 20 years in senior-level executive recruiting and is now CEO of executive search agency Creative Talent Endeavors, said he likes this question because it helps identify "proactive leaders who are willing to answer difficult questions and drive business results."

He recommends candidates use the STAR method — focusing on the situation, task, action, and result — to answer this question and really highlight their "initiative and drive."

"I'm also looking for candidates who can stand up to additional questioning well and describe specifics within each example or story they share when responding," he said.

He shared with us one example of how a STAR-formatted answer to this question might look:

• Situation: "Our SaaS solution isn't cutting it."
• Task: "I was assigned to fix the problem."
• Action: "I spoke to other CTOs to get recommendations, found a final list of five, and then evaluated them against the incumbent so we could make the right hiring decision."
• Result: Explain the end result and what happened after taking the actions described.

'Tell me about a time when something went terribly wrong with a project.'

This question shows a candidate's "ability to take responsibility for mistakes, solve problems, communicate effectively, and collaborate with others," said Lauren Monroe, who leads the creative practice group at Aquent, a staffing agency for creative, marketing, and design roles.

An ideal answer would "name the specific challenge faced, acknowledge the mistakes made, and identify the actions taken, lessons learned, and solutions implemented to solve the problem," she added.

'What key elements need to be in your next role, and what would be a dealbreaker for you?'

Amri Celeste, a recruitment manager and interview coach, likes this question because it gets at "what a candidate is really looking for in a role and whether the role we're discussing matches what they expect in their next role."

"It's also an opportunity to open up a more honest dialogue about their values, work style, and career goals, which helps me learn about not only how well they suit the role, but also how well they might suit the team and management style of the manager," she said.

'Tell me about yourself.'

It's a tried-and-true interview question, and Andrew Fennell, a former corporate recruiter and the founder of the résumé-builder website StandOut CV, leans on it to set the tone in interviews.

"After introducing myself and explaining how I've arrived to the point of this interview, I ask the candidate to do the same," he said.

"It relaxes the atmosphere a bit, makes it a bit more conversational, and allows the candidate to give a well-rounded summary of their experience and skills," he added.

'Tell me about the greatest impact you made at a company and what helped you achieve that impact.'

Tessa White, a former head of HR, is the CEO of The Job Doctor and the author of "The Unspoken Truths for Career Success."

Besides asking about a candidate's achievements, White also tries to gauge their ability to problem-solve by asking questions about challenges they've encountered in the past.

She'll ask, for example, "Tell me about a time you were at odds with someone or a department and you were able to successfully move through it."

Other times, she might say, "Tell me about a time when an initiative or project you were leading wasn't going the way you hoped. How did you handle it and what is your philosophy for addressing obstacles?"

For all of these questions, she said the ideal answer should be "authentic and real." If it's not, a recruiter can "sniff it a mile away," she said.

"I'm not looking for the answer you think I want to hear," she said. "I'm looking to see an imperfect person that has insight into their strengths as well as someone who understands how to learn from previous mistakes."

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction. However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

• Job seekers with prestigious schools or employers on their résumés can benefit from a "halo" effect.
• Yet education and experience are not reliable indicators of job performance, an expert told BI.
• Some employers are shifting focus to skills and behaviors to improve hiring outcomes.

Job seekers who are attractive, who went to the right school, or who worked at the right company can enjoy a so-called "halo effect" that outweighs other factors that often are better predictors of how well someone will perform in a role.

While they look good on paper, that's a problem for employers and many job seekers, executives told Business Insider.

Shiran Danoch saw firsthand how bias can affect hiring. Early in her career, she thought she'd found the perfect candidate for a role she was trying to fill.

Yet after Danoch's boss interviewed the woman, he called Danoch into his office.

"He said, 'Why did you bring her here? She isn't one of us,'" Danoch told BI.

It slowly occurred to Danoch that her boss's problem was with the candidate's ethnicity despite what Danoch saw as her obvious fit for the role.

There's a lot of work to do to reduce bias that unfairly hurts — and helps — candidates, said Danoch, an organizational psychologist who's the CEO and founder of Informed Decisions, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to help organizations reduce bias and improve their interviewing processes.

Danoch estimates that perhaps as many as nine in 10 hires either suffer or benefit from a bias that shapes the interviewer's perceptions of the candidate's aptitude for the role.

She said this means people who aren't a great fit could end up landing the role, and candidates who would do the job better might be sidelined.

Education and experience aren't sure bets

Danoch said analysis of thousands of interviews on the Informed Decisions interview platform, combined with findings from broader academic research, highlights that "dominant-skill" bias is a prominent risk.

"When you're interviewing a candidate, there might be one specific skill that paints your overall impression," she said. Often, Danoch said, that is "effective communication." That can mean job seekers who are strong communicators can talk their way past their weaknesses.

Another risk is being wowed by grads from top schools or those who worked at high-profile companies. Substantial bodies of research have shown that education and experience aren't good predictors of how successful someone will be in a job, she said.

Meantime, it's easy to see why a hiring manager might assume someone who'd worked at one big-name tech firm might be a good fit for another. That's not always the case, according to Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global HR company that helps employers hire abroad.

He told BI that in past roles at other companies, there was often a push to focus on Ivy League grads or people who'd worked at certain tech firms. That made it hard for candidates coming from small startups, for example, to get hired, he said.

"You'd work at Facebook. You'd work at Google. You'd go to LinkedIn. There's a merry-go-round," Price said.

Yet he said those in sales, for example, who had halo résumés by virtue of having been at top companies, weren't always the strongest contributors when it came to basic metrics like how much revenue they brought in.

"The top people weren't only coming from the big, established organizations," Price said.

Hiring for skills

To improve the quality of its hires, Price said, Deel reformatted its interviewing process to focus on behaviors and less on factors like education and experience. That's led managers to report being more satisfied with the work they were getting from new hires, he said.

Price said it's not that experience doesn't count. Instead, it's evaluated alongside factors like functional skills for doing the job, behaviors, and motivation. To gain insight into skills, Deel will often have job seekers complete assessments.

That can help root out candidates who might toss around industry buzzwords, though they might lack some abilities.

"Because you've worked here and you've worked on this problem type, my assumption is, from a halo CV perspective, you're going to be really good," he said.

Price said that because some job seekers might stay at an organization for two to three years, hiring managers could take that to mean the candidates are good at what they do.

Yet "that is a big assumption," he said.

Some employers have announced efforts to look more at abilities rather than pedigree. In some cases, this can mean waiving degree requirements.

However, David Deming, a professor of political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School, previously told BI that even as some employers do away with prerequisites that candidates for some roles have a bachelor's degree, those doing the hiring might still consider whether a candidate has one.

"Firms are wanting credit for removing a requirement, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're changing their hiring at the end of the day," he said.

Strong communicators can win out

Danoch, from Informed Decisions, said one reason strong communicators can benefit from a halo effect in interviews relates to those doing the hiring.

"Because a lot of interviewers are inexperienced in interviewing, that's what grabs them," she said, referring to a candidate's communication chops.

While such abilities are often among the soft skills many employers say they value, Danoch said being able to communicate well isn't likely to be the only attribute needed for a role. Even if communication is important, she said, it shouldn't be the sole factor for hiring.

Danoch said the halo effect can be problematic if it leads employers to hire candidates who might not be the best fit. Conversely, she said, a "shadow effect" can result in capable job seekers being discounted.

"The candidate is either all good or either all bad," Danoch said.

Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your job search? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.

Over the past two years, American businesses have been engaged in a rapid-fire restructuring of their corporate hierarchies. In the name of "flattening," they've been waging war on middle managers — trimming an entire tier of supervisory jobs that Mark Zuckerberg derided as nothing more than "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." Following Meta's lead, Citi reduced its 13 layers of management to eight. UPS axed 12,000 of its 85,000 managers. And in September, Amazon announced plans to increase its ratio of workers to supervisors by at least 15%. "I hate bureaucracy," CEO Andy Jassy declared, echoing the zeal for "efficiency" that Elon Musk, one of the pioneers of the current corporate flattening, is now seeking to unleash on the halls of government.

But here's the thing: It's not just that tens of thousands of middle managers have lost their jobs. It's that the jobs themselves have been eliminated — and they may not be coming back.

To test that theory, I asked Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics provider, to crunch the numbers for me, using its database of job postings aggregated from across the internet. It divided employees into two buckets of managers (senior leadership and middle management) and two buckets of lower-level employees (experienced associates and junior workers). Then it looked at how many job openings employers are posting today, compared with the hiring heyday of 2022.

What the data reveals is stark. Earlier this year, when white-collar hiring was at its lowest point, openings for junior roles — entry-level positions requiring little to no prior experience — were down by 14%. But hiring had plunged by 43% for middle managers and 57% for senior leaders. If you had any sort of management experience, your job prospects were bleak.

Since then, though, we've seen a significant rebound in job postings for almost everyone — except middle managers. In October, employers were still advertising 42% fewer middle-management positions than they did in April 2022. Which means that those who lost their jobs in the Great Flattening are now facing a whole new horror: There aren't any positions left for them to take.

The assault on middle managers dates back to the 1980s, when globalization gave rise to a new philosophy of management that prioritized cost cutting over everything else. Supervisors — earning big salaries for rubber-stamping the work of their subordinates — became an easy target. Trim the fat, the thinking went, and the efficiencies will follow. From 1986 to 1998, one study found, the number of managers reporting to division heads dropped by 25%. At the same time, the number of managers reporting directly to a CEO nearly doubled.

Executives got the flattening that they wanted. But it's unclear whether getting rid of middle managers actually made companies run more efficiently. As I wrote last year, one study found that businesses with fewer layers of management were able to deliver their products faster. But study after study found that when middle managers do their jobs right, they bolster performance more than either top executives or ground-level employees. Supervisors do real work. They motivate. They mentor. They communicate critical information to and from different parts of the company. They smooth out glitches and spot opportunities. They're the ones who keep the trains running.

But now is an especially bad time to be an experienced supervisor. According to an analysis by Live Data Technologies, another workforce analytics provider, middle managers made up 32% of layoffs last year, compared with 20% in 2019. And as the data from Revelio Labs shows, companies appear to have no intention of refilling those supervisory roles, even as they resume hiring for lower-level jobs. That has created a double whammy for middle managers: There's a sharp spike in job seekers, and they're competing for an increasingly small universe of open roles.

Over the past year I've heard from hundreds of managers mired in this double whammy. What's struck me is how eerily similar their stories are. They all come across as smart and articulate. They're all in their late 40s to 50s. When they got laid off from their supervisory jobs, they didn't expect their job search to be too difficult. After all, they'd spent decades honing their skills and climbing the corporate ladder, often at leading companies. Surely, all that experience had to count for something. But despite sending out hundreds of applications, they can't get anyone to return their calls. They're utterly baffled, and they all have the same question: What is going on here?

It's the question I've been asking, too — combing through government data, talking to employers and economists, studying applicant-tracking systems. Because so many of the frustrated job seekers are older, I thought maybe we were seeing some new form of age discrimination: Call it the Curse of the Gen X Professional. But it's only after seeing the data from Revelio Labs that I finally understand what's going on: There just aren't enough supervisory jobs to go around anymore.

In response, many displaced managers have swallowed their pride and started applying to jobs lower on the corporate food chain. As Revelio Labs' data shows, nonmanagerial jobs are faring much better these days — and you'd think companies would be thrilled to get the experience and know-how of seasoned professionals on the cheap. But take the example of a former middle manager I'll call Rick, who is 54. After getting rejected for all the supervisory jobs he could find, he widened his search to include entry-level positions — only to be rejected for being overqualified.

At this point, all Rick wants is a chance to prove himself. "Forget the titles, forget all that other stuff," he told me. "I just need a job. My unemployment runs out in about 30 days. I'll come in and do a great job for you."

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of the Great Flattening: The very experience that should be a selling point for senior leaders has become a liability. Some have tried deleting former jobs from their resumes, to hide their supervisory experience. Others, like Rick, omit the year they graduated from college. One former chief operating officer, whose search has gone so poorly that she's now applying to be an executive assistant, told me she addresses her overqualified-ness in her cover letters. "I understand that my résumé has some big titles on it, but let me tell you who I am at heart," she writes. "I really want to be doing this, and I'm not wedded to the title."

What all the out-of-work managers want to know is: When is the hiring freeze for supervisors going to thaw? That depends, in large part, on whether companies come to view the flattening as a success. Many CEOs insist they aren't getting rid of middle managers just to save money. They think having fewer layers of management will, as Zuckerberg put it, create a "stronger" company that can build "higher-quality products faster." That hints at a dark prospect for managers like Rick: The rung of the corporate ladder they spent their careers reaching could be gone for good.

There's a chance, of course, that the current craze for corporate flattening could ease over time. Companies are already discovering that having few middle managers is placing an enormous strain on their operations. The supervisors who survived the purge have been forced to take on much larger teams, and they're burned out to a crisp. Gen Zers, deprived of their mentors, are increasingly disengaged. Departments are more siloed than ever, with no one to do the tedious and thankless and essential work of coordinating across different teams. The best hope for managers like Rick is that CEOs are getting a real-time refresher in the value of managers.

"I'm not at that point in my life where I'm ready to take that step back," Rick told me. "I just want to work with good people and enjoy what I'm doing. I could go to Domino's and start delivering pizza. But I know I can do a lot more than that."

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

• EY has an AI-powered avatar named eVe that candidates can use for a pre-interview.
• The AI avatar allows candidates to ask questions and can help them prep for a real-person interview.
• EY also lets some candidates take virtual tours of their offices in the metaverse.

EY, a Big Four accounting and consulting firm, is turning to technology to improve its recruiting process — in part by allowing job candidates to warm up with an AI interviewer before getting face-to-face with a real person.

Company leaders who work on recruiting and metaverse experiences told Business Insider the AI interviewer was aimed at providing a better — and potentially less stressful — hiring process.

A link to the AI-powered avatar, called eVe, is sent out to candidates as soon as they are selected to advance to the interview stage. eVe can answer questions about the company and help candidates prepare for their interview with a real person, according to Francesca Jones, an early careers leader at EY.

The AI avatar, which appears on the screen as a real person would during a video chat, can be spoken to directly and offers verbal answers back within moments, mimicking an actual conversation. It can also be used with text like other chatbots.

eVe can walk candidates through what the EY hiring process is like and help with case study preparation. It can also answer follow-up questions and give detailed responses about how benefits like healthcare and retirement plans work at the company. eVe can be used at any point in the process, so candidates can revisit it when weighing whether or not to accept a job offer.

EY started offering eVe to job candidates in early October, so they are still waiting to get a fuller picture of how it is being used. However, eVe went through months of internal user testing with hundreds of interns, which gave a glimpse into how early-career professionals in particular would use the tool.

"I was amazed by the types of questions they asked and how much time they actually spent with it," Domhnaill Hernon, global lead of EY's Metaverse Lab, told Business Insider. He suspected the younger generation might spend two to three minutes with eVe and then move on, but they were regularly spending 15 to 20 minutes engaging with it conversationally, asking questions and follow-ups.

One intern who spent 25 minutes talking to eVe went into extreme detail evaluating EY's compensation benefits, particularly comparing the company's pension plan to its 401K offering. Others asked the sort of questions that many early-career professionals want to know ahead of interviews but might be afraid to ask, like what to wear.

Though it is powered by an OpenAI GPT-4 large language model, eVe's knowledge base comes entirely from EY content, so the AI avatar is basing all of its responses on information that is specific to the company, rather than generic answers pulled from the internet.

Jones said that beyond enhancing the recruiting process, the avatar also signals to candidates that the company is ahead of the game from a technology standpoint.

EY, like other major consulting firms, has focused heavily on AI. The company announced last year it had invested $1.4 billion on the technology and created its own large language model.

It's also not the only company to incorporate AI into the hiring process, with so-called AI interviewers becoming more common in the generative AI boom. Companies and recruiters are also using AI to sort through resumes and cover letters.

Apriora, a startup founded last year, provides companies with an AI interviewer called Alex, who can conduct early-stage interviews. The AI interviewer asks questions chosen by the company and can ask the candidate follow-up questions in real time. The startup raised $2.8 million in seed funding and graduated from startup-incubator Y Combinator.

Hernon said they worked with behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, and learning leaders inside and outside of EY to understand psychological safety, with the aim of reducing the "social threat" felt by the user as much as possible. In other words, they wanted eVe to feel less intimidating than a real person might, encouraging the user to ask questions that they otherwise might be too embarrassed to ask.

With that in mind, the team chose to make eVe look human-like, but not like it was pretending to be human, so the avatar is not photorealistic.

"You've removed that human social threat, but yet at the same time it feels human enough that they want to spend time interacting with it," he said.

Have a news tip or a story to share? Have you done a job interview with an AI avatar? Contact this reporter at [email protected].