Junior hiring is falling at AI-heavy companies. The people still getting in are showing something different.
I have been working with people who are not only getting shortlists but also converting multiple AI PM offers.
If you are trying to become a PM without PM experience, it helps to look at what is happening first.
Why is it harder than ever to get your first PM job, even when companies say they need more product people?
What the data shows
A Stanford Digital Economy Lab study looked at payroll data and found that workers aged 22 to 25 in the jobs most exposed to AI saw a 13% relative drop in employment. Their August 2026 update puts that gap at 19%.
Another study by Chandar and Klein Teeselink examined 1.25 billion job postings across 41 countries.
At companies adopting AI, the share of junior employees fell by 1.9 percentage points by March 2026, mainly because senior hiring grew faster. The junior share fell in 23 of the 31 countries they could measure.
Product management is no different.
LinkedIn ended its Associate Product Manager program, one of the best-known ways into PM, and replaced it with an Associate Product Builder track.
The application asks for a 60-second product demo instead of a resume.
If you are trying to switch in
Let’s understand with an example.
Say you are an engineer (for example) with three years at an IT services company in Pune, and you have wanted to move into product for a while. The usual routes are not great.
An MBA takes two years and doesn’t guarantee a PM role.
APM programs are rare and very competitive. An internal move depends on your company having product roles at all, and many services companies don’t.
So you apply to PM roles directly. Your resume says “backend engineer”, and recruiters filter you out before anyone reads further.
What still works
Look again at what LinkedIn asks for now.
A 60-second demo of something you built. The way in hasn’t closed. It has changed. It used to be “show us your resume”. Now, more and more, it’s “show us your product”.
That’s good news if you’re switching.
You can make a demo. You can’t go back and change your resume history.
The mistake most people make
Most people have a very superficial understanding of AI and their Products.
Even if you have created a RAG product and put it in your CV/Portfolio, you still fail the interview.
Because they have just understood the buzzword and then put it on the CV.
The hiring manager will go slightly deeper into what you have built. Can you do the RCA of this? What metrics have you moved? What are the metrics (not only product, but also the key metrics for Retrieval and Generation)?
What are successful candidates doing?
In our AI PM Cohort, people created 50+ products, and they are not only getting shortlists, but they can convert.
Some people are shipping products at Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
You can find their experience of 40+ People here
They are not only learning but also creating real products and preparing those for their interviews. (that too in detail).
They also create a 60-second demo of their products along with the CV.
This format works for LinkedIn’s application and for the first minute of any PM interview:
0 to 10 seconds: The problem. Who has it, and how often.
10 to 30 seconds: The product. Show the one flow that works.
30 to 45 seconds: One decision. What you chose not to build, and why.
45 to 60 seconds: One number. What you measured.
Two more ways in
The first is internal. He shows the tool to his manager and to the client’s PM. Now he’s the person on the team who thinks about the user. At services companies, that’s often how product-facing roles start.
The second is mid-size companies. If you’re only applying to startups and big tech, you are applying where it’s hardest to get in.
What can you do now?
In our AI PM Builder Cohort, every member builds working AI products and learns to present them as product stories, not code stories.
In our 1st cohort, 26 PMs shipped more than 60 products; 40% of the batch is placed.
In our 2nd cohort, 47 PMs are shipping products (currently they are in week 3).
We have started taking registrations for our 3rd Cohort.
Currently, we are running an Early Bird Discount for our 3rd Cohort — Fill the Form if you are interested
About Author
Shailesh Sharma! I help PMs and business leaders excel in Product, Strategy, and AI using First Principles Thinking.
AI Learning Resources
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