The Alarm, The Fire

AI layoffs are the alarm everyone can hear. The pipeline collapses underneath them is the fire, and it is burning through the next decade of talent. 

You did nothing wrong. You built a solid resume, applied to roles you were qualified for, and somewhere between your tenth application and your fiftieth, a filter you never met decided you were not a match. Nobody called, and nobody explained why. If that has happened to you this year, you are not imagining a trend, because you are living inside one.

Twenty-Five Years of Answering the Phone

For more than twenty-five years, I have watched people put thousands back to work by doing one simple thing: helping each other. We worked for Sun Microsystems, World Trade Center Building 2 was one of the offices supported by our Enterprise Network ServiceDesk PMO.  So incident command training and response took on a new meaning and a lesson that forever stayed with us ever since: when the floor drops out from under a workforce, people do not need a rescue plan with a two-year timeline. They need someone to answer the phone today and help, they do not need reports telling them how bad it is, they need jobs.  We dealt with the largest Major Incident of a lifetime and then had to deal with the layoffs that needed to follow. 

The tools we built for good will open-source hosting of LinkedIn groups for Jobs N Career Success and a Global Recruiters Network have been helping laid-off workers since September 11, 2001.     

That would not be enough for post AI Layoffs, followed by post AI Workflow impacts that begin with recent graduates to seasoned professionals.

I created the WomenAILabs.org after realizing a need for new solutions with the acceleration of AI.  The marketplace and workflows changed with AI.   Twenty-five years later, that same instinct-built Women AI Labs.  Not because I wanted to add another good will effort to my life, but I realized what we have is not going to solve the problem. 

 It is a matter of heart, not a matter of strategy decks.

Even so, heart alone does not scale, and over those twenty-five years I learned what does. You do not need to run a full-time nonprofit to help someone find work. You need a channel. Show up where displaced workers already gather, help the people directly in front of you, and connect everyone else to a community where supply meets demand. A hiring manager posts an open role. A mentor gives fifteen minutes. A friend calls a friend. That counts as infrastructure, and most cities do not build enough of it. 

“It is a matter of heart, not a matter of strategy decks.”

Dawn C. Simmons

The Alarm Everyone Already Hears

So why does that infrastructure matter more today than it did five years ago? Because the alarm is already ringing. AI-cited layoffs topped 54,000 in 2025, and Goldman Sachs now estimates the technology erases roughly 16,000 net jobs a month, with entry-level workers absorbing most of the impact. That number is loud enough that most people have already heard it.

54,836

AI-cited layoffs recorded in 2025 

The Fire Underneath It

The fire underneath it burns quieter. There are not enough jobs to solve the problem, and there are new AI Problems now that AI is accelerating a industrial fire of algorithmic bias.   A Harvard working paper that tracked 66 million workers across more than 280,000 companies found that entry-level hiring fell by roughly 80% at firms that adopted generative AI, compared with firms that did not, and those companies rarely handed junior workers more complex tasks to offset the loss. Resume.org surveyed employers directly, and nearly a third now expect to eliminate entry-level roles entirely by the end of this year.

80%

Drop in entry-level hiring at AI-adopting firms

Meanwhile, software now guards the door those workers used to walk through. Automated filters process 99.7% of applications before a human ever sees them, and two out of three companies admit those filters introduce bias, yet keep using them anyway.

99.7%

Of applications now pass through an automated filter

Put those numbers together, and a structural problem emerges instead of a cyclical one. Entry-level hiring is how a company grows its own senior bench. Remove today's junior hires, and you remove tomorrow's promotable seniors five or ten years from now. The pipeline does not just lose its bottom rung. It loses its future top, too.

That is exactly why I call algorithmic bias a governance failure rather than a diversity footnote. When a filter systematically screens out qualified people, it creates a model risk sitting inside your workforce plan, the same way an unpatched system created a risk inside your infrastructure before Y2K. Nobody built these filters with malice, but almost no one watches them closely enough.

Join the Channel

Which brings us to July 18 Vibe Coding Pilot. On that day, we partner with HDI-Chicagoland, to kick off popup innovation with Women AI Labs brings students, AI-displaced workers, and technologists together in Chicago, with a virtual track open to anyone, anywhere, for the Fix the Algorithm Vibe Coding Pilot. One challenge track tackles this exact problem, automated resume rejection and job search visibility, and the people living it work alongside the people who can help fix it, in the same room. 

If this year has hit you hard, come build with us. Test a hiring tool for bias. Meet people who can connect you to the next opportunity, even if it is not the one we build that day.

Steadier ground under you this year? Then you are exactly who I mean when I say connect people to where supply meets demand. Sponsor a track. Mentor a participant. Share July 18 with someone whose resume just disappeared into a filter. None of it requires a full-time job. It requires a channel, and a willingness to answer the phone.

That is how the fire dies down. Many people, each doing one thing, pointed the same direction, matter more than one organization trying to do everything alone.

Fix the Algorithm · Vibe Coding Pilot

July 18, 2026 — Chicago & Virtual

UIC Innovation Lab · one-day hybrid hackathon with a simultaneous virtual track.

Four challenge tracks: AI Layoff & Career Skills · Healthcare & Patient Support Equity · Commercial Service & Support Operations · Governance, Data & Public Decision Systems.

Join the pilot. Partner with us

Women AI Labs™ turns AI disruption into measurable repair: skills, proof, fairness, and opportunity.