Pay for New Hires Is Shrivelling
After years of salary increases, businesses across the economy say they’re reducing starting salaries for recruits
4 min
Pay for new hires is starting to shrivel after years of hefty salary bumps, requiring workers to reset what financial gains to expect from switching to a new job.
Wages, especially for people who changed jobs, climbed in recent years as companies competed for workers to fill pandemic-induced labor shortages. Now, as the job market cools and businesses become more cautious in their hiring, many companies are paying new recruits less than they did just months ago—in some cases, much less.
Among postings for more than 20,000 job titles on ZipRecruiter’s site this year, the average pay for a majority of roles has declined from last year. Some of the steepest drops have been in technology, transportation and other sectors that experienced frenzied hiring sprees in 2021 and early 2022.
Chanteal Brayboy, 25 years old, has been seeking user-experience design roles since last summer, ever since finishing a design boot camp. At the time, layoffs had just begun to churn through the tech economy.
She’s since applied for more than 2,000 roles, and only gotten calls for a couple interviews. The posted salaries for the jobs she’s interested in, she says, have fallen around $10,000 from those advertised a year ago.
“The market is completely different now, companies know they can pay less,” says Brayboy, who lives in Kalamazoo, Mich.
A sharp reversal
The declines mark a stark turnaround from 2022, when compensation for three-quarters of advertised job titles rose from the year before, according to ZipRecruiter. In a July survey of about 2,000 employers conducted by the online hiring platform, nearly half said they had reduced pay for recent job openings.
Overall wage growth continues and it surpassed inflation in June for the first time in two years as consumer price increases slowed. Still, wage growth peaked last summer and has since declined to 5.7%, according to Labor Department figures.
Because new hires account for less than 4% of all employed workers each month, says Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, it can take a while for adjustments in their pay to show up in the federal data. The mass layoffs many large companies have conducted lately, particularly in tech, have helped push salaries for new hires downward, says Pollak.
“Other companies no longer face pressure to match these Meta-sized offers,” she says, referring to Facebook’s parent company.
It isn’t just white-collar roles that are feeling the crimp.
During the pandemic, the Unionville, Tenn., pizza restaurant where Valerie Breshears works as a delivery driver boosted wages to $13 an hour to draw new workers. More recently, Breshears discovered from newly hired staff that the restaurant’s starting pay had been lowered to $11 an hour.
“I felt bad for them,” says Breshears, 38. She didn’t tell them she and other workers who had been hired earlier were making more money.
‘Just not as competitive’
In Denver, where retail company Appliance Factory & Mattress Kingdom is based, the company has recently been hiring administrative workers for around $18 an hour. A year ago, the company was paying $20 an hour, says Chief Executive Chuck Ewing.
“There are more people looking for work now, it’s just not as competitive,” he says.
Data from Gusto, a payroll and benefits software company serving more than 300,000 small and midsize businesses, shows that pay rates for new hires are 5% lower than they were for new recruits for the same roles at this time last year. While professional-service roles have been most affected—pay rates for engineers and developers, for example, have dropped 18% in the past year—workers in other industries have also been hit.
More in-demand workers in certain industries continue to get pay bumps, says Gusto economist Luke Pardue. The company’s data shows pay in tourism and construction, for example, has continued to rise.
During the pandemic, the supply chain for workers was “horrifically broken,” says Laurie Chamberlin, the North America head of LHH Recruitment Solutions. Many workers sat on the job-market sidelines, and companies competed furiously to get them through the door.
“There was kind of an auction mentality,” she says. “People were paying extraordinary amounts without a whole lot of negotiating power or long-term view.”
That’s now over, Chamberlin says: “They’re saying holy cow, I’m paying this person a lot, and they’re not worth what I paid for them.” In addition to laying off workers, she says, businesses have become cautious about what they’re willing to pay for new recruits.
Back when Jennifer O’Halloran, 40, was looking for advertising roles in late 2021, she racked up 21 interviews in a matter of weeks. She quickly secured multiple competing job offers, including one from ad agency Dentsu for a media-buying supervisor role that would have paid $95,000 with a $5,000 signing bonus.
“It was insane, everyone wanted to talk to me,” recalls O’Halloran, who’s based in San Francisco.
She ended up choosing another company that offered her more money, a role she quit last summer. Earlier this year when job-hunting again, she reached back out to Dentsu. She learned that roles comparable to the one she’d previously been offered were now paying between $85,000 and $90,000, and with no signing bonus.
Dentsu declined to comment.
Too good to last
In Tampa, Fla., Meg Reilly, president at placement firm National Mortgage Staffing, says that salaries have dropped for a range of roles as the real-estate industry has slowed. For mortgage closers and underwriters, the drop has been as much as 30%. The fall has been precipitous, though many veteran candidates were primed to expect it.
“They knew it wasn’t a forever thing,” she says, of elevated salaries.
While employers have more leverage now on pay, they should tread carefully, says Marc Goldberg, CEO of Stages Collective, which specializes in recruiting for the ad tech industry.
“I advise my clients not to go down too far, because you’ll have a temporary employee,” he says. To control costs without alienating applicants, he says, companies are doing things like increasing performance incentives while reducing base salaries for certain roles, such as sales.
In Boston, Sherri Carpineto, 46, has been job-hunting since February, when she was laid off from her director role at a medical-device startup. Companies are conducting more drawn-out vetting processes, she says, including asking applicants to complete numerous sample work projects. Sometimes, they request test assignments even before she’s made it to the interview stage.
Carpineto, who has 20 years of experience in strategy and operations and is currently doing independent consulting, says the jobs she’s interested in, which are director-level or above, are paying around 20% less than what she was making at her old position. She’s noticed prospective employers are tending to combine more responsibilities and roles under one title.
“They’re paying less and asking more,” she says.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
4 minA sharp technology sell-off has exposed a new anxiety on global markets: whether the enormous borrowing behind the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom can generate sufficient returns as interest rates rise and Chinese competition intensifies.
The artificial-intelligence investment boom has powered technology shares, semiconductor manufacturers and data-centre operators to extraordinary heights. Last week, investors were given a reminder that much of this expansion is being built with borrowed money.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.5 per cent over the week ended October 16, its weakest performance since late June. Semiconductor shares suffered an even deeper correction, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index losing about 11.4 per cent.
The selling spread quickly through global markets. Micron Technology fell 14.6 per cent over the week, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix dropped approximately 18 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
This was more than a routine bout of profit-taking. Investors were reassessing three interconnected risks: higher interest rates, the rapidly expanding debt burden attached to AI infrastructure and the prospect of stronger competition from Chinese memory-chip manufacturers.
The debt behind the AI build-out
Artificial intelligence requires a physical infrastructure network of enormous scale. Data centres must be built, advanced processors purchased, power supplies secured and cooling systems installed before customers begin generating meaningful revenue from them.
Technology companies are increasingly supplementing their own cash with corporate bonds, syndicated loans, equipment leases, private credit and project-level financing.
JPMorgan describes the emerging funding model as a combination of conventional corporate borrowing and project finance tied to individual data-centre assets. In Australia, the Reserve Bank estimates that syndicated loans accounted for approximately three-quarters of data-centre financing during 2025 and 2026 to date.
The numbers are becoming large enough to affect broader credit markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has cited Wall Street estimates suggesting AI-related investment-grade bond issuance could approach US$300 billion in 2026 alone.
That borrowing is not automatically problematic. Debt can be an efficient way to finance long-lived infrastructure when future revenue is sufficiently predictable. The concern is that AI technology, customer demand and computing economics are changing much faster than the repayment schedules attached to the assets.
A data centre financed today may carry debt for years. Investors must therefore make assumptions about future utilisation rates, electricity prices, chip performance, customer concentration and the amount businesses will ultimately pay for AI computing.
When interest rates rise, those assumptions become less forgiving.
Inflation changes the calculation
September’s US inflation data intensified the pressure. Consumer prices increased 3.7 per cent over the year, ahead of market expectations and up from 3.4 per cent in August.
The hotter reading reduced confidence that interest rates would fall quickly and pushed bond yields higher. That matters particularly for companies whose valuations depend on profits expected well into the future, as well as highly leveraged infrastructure operators that may need to refinance.
CoreWeave has emerged as a closely watched test case. The specialist cloud-computing company has accumulated substantial debt and lease obligations to build AI capacity, while relying on a concentrated group of large technology customers.
Its shares fell sharply during the sell-off, while the cost of insuring its debt against default climbed. CoreWeave has argued that its contracted backlog more than covers its obligations and that financial markets do not always understand its business model. Nevertheless, its securities have become a proxy for investor confidence in debt-funded AI infrastructure.
Oracle, another major investor in AI computing capacity, fell 8.8 per cent in Friday trading, while CoreWeave dropped 15.5 per cent.
The question is shifting from how much AI infrastructure can be built to how profitably it can be operated.
China adds another source of pressure
Interest rates were not the only catalyst. Reports of advances by Chinese memory-chip producer ChangXin Memory Technologies raised concerns that lower-cost Chinese products could increase competition across the global semiconductor industry.
Memory chips are essential to AI systems, but the industry is historically cyclical. Periods of tight supply and high pricing can encourage rapid investment, eventually producing oversupply and falling margins.
The prospect of a well-funded Chinese competitor expanding its technological capabilities unsettled investors in Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It also demonstrated that AI-related demand does not insulate chipmakers from conventional competitive pressures.
That combination—slower rate cuts, more expensive financing and potentially cheaper supply—challenged the assumption that every company exposed to AI would enjoy continually expanding margins.
A reset rather than the end of the boom
The sell-off does not establish that the AI boom is ending. Demand for computing power remains strong, the largest technology companies continue to generate formidable cash flows and many infrastructure projects are backed by long-term customer contracts.
What has changed is the market’s willingness to overlook the price and financing structure of that growth.
The most resilient companies are likely to be those able to fund investment from operating cash flow, secure long-duration customers and demonstrate that new capacity will earn returns comfortably above its financing costs.
More speculative operators may face greater scrutiny, particularly where debt is expensive, customers are concentrated or expected revenue depends on demand that has not yet materialised.
For Australian investors, the lesson extends beyond US technology shares. Local data-centre operators, infrastructure funds, electricity suppliers and property groups are increasingly exposed to the same investment cycle.
Artificial intelligence may remain one of the defining growth themes of the decade. But last week’s correction showed that enthusiasm for the technology does not eliminate financial discipline.
The next stage of the AI boom will be judged not only by computing power, model performance or demand for chips, but by something more traditional: whether the assets being financed can generate enough cash to repay the money borrowed to build them.
Fact box
Nasdaq Composite: Down 4.5 per cent for the week ended October 16, 2026
Philadelphia Semiconductor Index: Down approximately 11.4 per cent
Micron Technology: Down approximately 14.6 per cent
Samsung Electronics: Down approximately 18 per cent
SK Hynix: Down approximately 24 per cent
US September inflation: 3.7 per cent annually
Estimated 2026 AI-related investment-grade issuance: Approximately US$300 billion
A luxury lifestyle might cost more than it used to, but how does it compare with cities around the world?
From gorilla encounters in Uganda to a reimagined Okavango retreat, Abercrombie & Kent elevates its African journeys with two spectacular lodge transformations.
