Ask any CFO for predictions about the 2024 economy (and trust us, we did), and they’ll often preface with a cautious stipulation: Sure, this is our best guess—but no one has a crystal ball.
But one CFO does have an especially unique lens that amounts to something like a crystal ball for the hiring sector: Erica Gessert, CFO of freelancing and hiring network Upwork.
She started her career on the financial services side of things in the late ’90s, amid the first dot-com boom, and then as boom turned to bust, transitioned into roles with telecom and tech companies during the 2000s and 2010s, including PayPal, Sprint, and Virgin Mobile, she explained to CFO Brew.
Gessert joined Upwork in May 2023 (two days before the company reported earnings—but that’s a story for another day). “I came in at a very unique time, not just for Upwork, but for the world writ large,” she explained. “Q1 of last year was marked by an extraordinary number of layoffs…that also affected Upwork, particularly on our enterprise side.”
Extraordinary in the worst sense, of course: Tech layoffs were thought to exceed 240,000 in 2023, easily beating 2022’s figures.
That timing trained Gessert’s eyes to spot opportunities for growth.
“Coming in, Upwork was not profitable. I made the choice actually to invest into some of the growth that would be experienced during the pandemic,” she said. “Like many, many CFOs last year, and many of my personal colleagues and friends, we were focused on cost management and really getting that right, while also finding the opportunity to reinvest in growth.”
The full picture of AI growth. And that gets us to the matter at hand. Gessert and her team have access to both big-picture and granular data about the state of hiring. If she notices a trend, that’s because it’s likely happening.
To that end, the fastest-growing job category right now isn’t a surprise—rhymes with schm-artificial schm-intelligence—but Gessert’s insight helps clarify how industries will react to AI disruption.
“That’s just in the AI category itself,” Gessert said, noting it grew 63% in the most recent quarter. “What we see in our data is that our AI job category doesn’t actually capture all of the growth.”
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Exhibit A: “One of the job categories where people are actually thinking that there will be disruption…is in places like translation,” Gessert said, noting that existing tech tools, like Google Translate, have already impacted the industry significantly.
So, what does AI do to a struggling field like translation? Two things at once, which seem antithetical: Gessert notes that while there’s been some dips in the popularity of translation work, “we’re also seeing the wages in translation going up significantly,” she explained.
That’s because new jobs are being created within the field. “We have AI clients on the enterprise side, [and] they’re actually reaching out and hiring translators to train their AI models on foreign languages,” she continued. “There are all these new jobs coming out of these categories because of AI, model-building, and growth.” It’s not just translation: “We’re continuing to see growth in almost every job category with some AI applications,” she added.
Wage increases. The wage increases for translation jobs is also a solid indicator of what Gessert’s team will be focused on next year.
“More broadly, just in terms of job market trends and other things, I think we were all pretty pleased to see the good jobs report in December,” Gessert noted. Now, her team is most keen on watching “whether or not we continue to see some increase in wages,” which notably didn’t happen in 2023 on the company’s platform, she pointed out.
“What we typically see is every year there’s a step up in terms of…average hourly wage,” Gessert explained. 2023’s nearly flat wage accretion “was a distinctive mark, in terms of the uncertainty and shakiness of the job market in general,” she said. “We’re watching that in 2024…The sign of the economy continuing to stabilize would be that we start to see better wage accretion in 2024.”
But there’s just one stipulation, she said: “It’s still early days…We can’t call it yet.”