US banks employ 4.7% fewer junior workers than they did in October 2022, even as their mid- and senior-level ranks keep growing. Bloomberg reported that finding from our research on junior bankers on October 22, a day after a Forbes column cited the same trend.
That same week, our workforce data appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Inc., in stories about disappearing diversity roles and the rise of part-time executives. Each describes changes within specific jobs that the monthly unemployment rate doesn't capture.
Junior bank jobs are down 4.7% since 2022
In Banks Have Fewer Entry-Level Jobs, But Higher Ranks Are Growing, Jo Constantz walks through Banks Are Losing Interest in Junior Talent in the AI Era, and frames the drop against 2022, the year ChatGPT was released.
The split is clearest at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, where junior headcount slipped as senior ranks expanded. Wells Fargo has fewer jobs at both levels than it did in 2022. Goldman Sachs went the other way and added roles at both.
The decline is steepest in commercial and retail banking. In investment banking and capital markets, it came later and was more modest. It also appears specific to banking, since junior headcount in insurance is still growing.
Banks are hiring fewer juniors, and attrition isn't what's driving the drop. Junior hires fell from about 10.5% of junior headcount before ChatGPT to about 8.5% in 2024 and 2025.
Bank jobs are also unusually exposed to AI. Of junior bank postings, 49% are AI-exposed, compared with 35% elsewhere in the economy, yet only 8.6% mention AI at all. Our read is that banks are restructuring around AI more than they are being automated by it, and it's too early to say how much of the junior decline AI explains. We track that question each month in the AI Labor Market Tracker. AI is also an easy explanation to reach for. When we looked at companies that blamed layoffs on AI, some appeared to be cutting costs instead.
Martin Whittaker, founding CEO of Just Capital, pointed to the same trend a day before Bloomberg in a Forbes column syndicated by Yahoo Finance. With tech now 40% of the S&P 500, he lists a likely decline in entry-level jobs among three AI risks worth watching, citing our finding that junior banker headcount has been shrinking since 2022.
A note on method. We classify seniority by job title using our job architecture, exclude interns, and count every role at US banks, from engineering and marketing to core finance. The full report explains how we define junior roles.
US employers have cut more than 2,600 diversity roles since 2023
Our data shows US employers have cut more than 2,600 roles with "diversity" or "DEI" in the job title or description since 2023. Talmon Joseph Smith used that figure in Black Unemployment Hints at a Job Market in Worse Shape Than It Seems, published October 19 in The New York Times and republished by The Boston Globe.
The story's argument is that rising Black unemployment points to a weaker job market than the 4.2% headline rate suggests. Black unemployment rose from 6% in August to 7% in September, the fastest one-month increase since 2012 outside the pandemic. That is almost double the 3.6% rate for white workers.
The Times names three pressures on Black professionals: the loss of diversity roles at large companies, federal layoffs, and slower white-collar hiring. Our count speaks to the first. The article also cautions that monthly unemployment estimates for demographic groups rest on small household survey samples and can swing from month to month. A count of the roles themselves doesn't depend on a survey sample, which makes it a useful cross-check.
The figure fits a longer pattern in our data. DEI headcount at Russell 3000 companies is down about 15% from its mid-2022 peak, as we found in The Rise and Fall of DEI in Corporate America. Hiring has shifted too: Black women's share of new hires fell from about 6.9% to 6.4% since 2020.
Fractional executive roles keep rising, and CFOs lead the shift
Executive positions described as fractional rose from 5 per 1,000 in 2018 to 18 per 1,000 in 2024, according to Revelio data. Emmalyse Brownstein cited the figure in Why Fast-Growing Companies Are Bypassing Full-Time CFOs for Part-Time Experts, published October 20 in Inc.
The piece looks at why companies in roughly the $5 million to $30 million revenue range hire part-time CFOs from firms like Arena CFO, 512Financial, and Kimberly Services. Their finances have grown more complex, but a full-time CFO is out of reach on budget or timing. Remote work and a rise in new business formation have helped demand grow since the pandemic, and some clients later hire their fractional CFO full time.
Our more recent numbers show the trend hasn't slowed. In 2026, 24 of every 1,000 new executive positions advertised were fractional, up from 9 five years earlier. CFOs make up 20% of fractional executive postings, more than any other role, which is why the Inc. story centers on them. We covered those figures in Fractional Executive Roles Are on the Rise after the Financial Times reported on the trend.
This creates a blind spot for anyone counting executives. A fractional CFO serving several companies at once shows up as a full-time executive hire at none of them, which is one reason we track how roles are described in job postings alongside headcount.
About the data
Revelio Labs is a workforce intelligence and research company. We build standardized workforce data from publicly available records, including professional profiles and job postings, and classify roles and seniority with our own job architecture. Researchers, investors, and HR teams use the Revelio Terminal to compare hiring, headcount, and roles across companies. You can look up headcount for individual employers in our company directory, and see how each field is defined in the data dictionary. Our monthly Revelio Public Labor Statistics and AI Labor Market Tracker are free to read.
To run the same seniority analysis for your industry or a list of companies, talk to our team.