---
id: "claim-entry-level-slashing"
type: "claim"
source_timestamps: ["¶2"]
tags: ["hiring-trends", "workforce-reduction"]
related: ["concept-pyramid-talent-model", "entity-decibio", "claim-ai-exposed-job-decline"]
confidence: "high"
testable: true
speakers: ["Atta Tarki", "Joseph Raczynski"]
sources: ["reskilling"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-reskilling"
originDay: 10
articleStem: "hbr-edu-45-consulting-firms-hire-talent"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/10/how-ai-is-upending-how-consulting-firms-hire-talent"
sourceTitle: "How AI Is Upending How Consulting Firms Hire Talent"
---
# Drastic Reductions in Entry-Level Hiring

**Claim:** Professional services firms are already making drastic cuts to their entry-level hiring pipelines in response to AI's efficiency gains.

The authors cite specific, highly aggressive reductions across different firm sizes and sectors:
- A **global legal-tech CEO** reported that top law firms are considering slashing their summer associate classes from a historical average of **100 down to just 30**.
- [[entity-decibio]], a specialized 50-person management consulting firm, is reducing its incoming entry-level class from **15 hires in 2021 to a planned 4 hires** for the upcoming year.

Notably, this reduction at DeciBio is occurring **despite the firm experiencing double-digit revenue growth** during the same period — indicating that the hiring cuts are driven purely by AI productivity gains rather than economic downturns. This is the mechanism that hollows out the base of [[concept-pyramid-talent-model]] and connects to the macro data in [[claim-ai-exposed-job-decline]].

**Confidence: HIGH (directional) / anecdotal (specifics).** Enrichment: the *directional* claim that AI is driving reductions in entry-level hiring for AI-exposed professional roles is strongly supported by aggregate data — Stanford ADP payroll analysis, NY Fed surveys (firms scaling back hiring, especially for college-educated workers), and survey synthesis showing ~60% of companies have cut jobs in anticipation of AI (though only ~2% because AI is currently doing the work). **However, the specific case numbers (DeciBio 15→4; law firms 100→30) are not independently verifiable from open sources and should be treated as anecdotal evidence from the article.** Reductions are significant in tech and some services but not yet universal across all professional services.