Employers are looking for one thing from recent grads that they can’t get from artificial intelligence: humanity.
State of play: The ability to communicate is the No. 1 skill most requested by employers in job postings for new college graduates, according to research by Lightcast.
It’s among a host of people skills that employers seek from recent grads, according to Lightcast, which assessed more than 1.3 million job postings for entry-level workers with a bachelor’s degree.
“There are certain things that AI can’t do,” Lightcast senior economist Rachel Sederberg tells Axios. “And those are going to be increasingly important.”
By the numbers: 44% of job postings for recent grads require communication skills, while 28% want demonstrated management ability and 27% want customer service experience, Lightcast reports.
The intrigue: For now, there’s little sign of employers seeking AI skills in job postings for new grads, despite companies pursuing AI at a feverish pace, Sederberg says.
“It’s still a little early to see that,” she said, but “it is going to be creeping in more and more.”
Job descriptions often “take a while to be updated,” she says. Sometimes “the recruiter puts up the same job description year after year.”
Zoom in: Though there are signs of the job market beginning to tighten a bit — jobless claims hit their highest weekly rate since October 2021 on Thursday — recent grads don't have much to fear.
“It’s still a very strong market,” Sederberg says. “There’s still a lot of opportunity out there for recent graduates. We still have a massive number of job openings relative to the unemployed.”
Health care makes up about 18% of new grad jobs, with positions such a registered nurse particularly in demand.
Although many major employers — like Google and JPMorgan Chase — are demanding workers to come back to the office, about 100,000 job openings for recent grads were fully remote, according to Lightcast.
Be smart: One reason why recent grads are finding so many opportunities is that so many older workers retired during the pandemic.
Many of them “aren’t coming back into the labor force,” Sederberg says.
The bottom line: Recent grads have reason to be hopeful about their job prospects despite the advent of AI.
Netflix's tightening of password-sharing among users has led to a surge in new sign-ups, with viewers opting to pay lest they miss out on the next big streaming thing.
Why it matters: Until just recently, Netflix password sharing was de rigueur among users. But the streaming giant raised eyebrows this year by enforcing — then expanding — a policy designed to dramatically limit the ability of family, friends and even former paramours to use a single login.
Driving the news: On Friday, analytics firm Antenna released data that showed a massive jump in U.S. user acquisition in the immediate aftermath of Netflix alerting U.S. subscribers last month that it would begin curbing shared passwords.
Netflix saw close to 100,000 daily sign-ups on May 26 and May 27, Antenna shared in a blog post.
"Average daily Sign-ups to Netflix reached 73k during that period, a +102% increase from the prior 60-day average. These exceed the spikes in Sign-ups Antenna observed during the initial U.S. Covid-19 lockdowns in March and April 2020."
Some Netflix subscribers opted to cancel, but those numbers were swamped by new sign-ups, Antenna noted.
What they're saying: In its first-quarter earnings report, Netflix itself predicted that the crackdown would create a halo effect on sign-ups and revenue.
"Paid sharing is another important initiative as widespread account sharing (100M+ households) undermines our ability to invest in and improve Netflix for our paying members, as well as build our business," it said in a shareholder letter.
"But as borrowers start to activate their own accounts and existing members add 'extra member' accounts, we see increased acquisition and revenue."
The Justice Department on Friday announced charges against two Russian nationals accused of laundering cryptocurrency one of the most notorious cyberthefts in the history of Bitcoin: Mt. Gox.
Driving the news: Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, are accused of attempting to whitewash 647,000 in bitcoins (worth around $17 billion today) and using the funds to launch another exchange that was popular with various kinds of criminals: BTC-e.
A British startup called Uncommon is seeking to create lab-grown bacon, and just raised $30 million to further its efforts.
Why it matters: Venture capitalists continue to plug big money into cultivated meat startups, even though the products themselves remain illegal in every country but Singapore.
The embrace by General Motors and Ford of Tesla's charging standard in future electric vehicles is a clear win for consumers, making charging easier and more accessible.
But it's also a win for Tesla, the EV industry's 800-pound gorilla, which seems to have scored a landmark victory in its effort to make its charging standard the dominant one.
As we await new inflation data and a Federal Reserve decision next week, there's an important backdrop emerging from the markets. Bond prices imply that the Fed's war on inflation is, in effect, won.
Why it matters: This backdrop makes it easier for the Fed to pause its rate hikes next week, as it has telegraphed it may, regardless of what the backward-looking May Consumer Price Index data due out Tuesday says.
Plenty of teenagers are nabbing summer jobs this year and the pay is way better than you'd think.
Why it matters: The surge of young folks into the workforce has been happening for the past few years and at first seemed like a pandemic blip —but turns out it's a trend with some legs.
Why it matters: It could trigger a series of unprecedented changes to America's federal food assistance system as legislators gear up to reauthorize the farm bill.
