Have graduate jobs really nose-dived?

ISE’s Pulse Survey and Group GTI data shows the market isn’t quite declining as widely reported, explains Stephen Isherwood, joint CEO.

Have graduate vacancies really tanked over the last few months? According to Adzuna and Indeed, graduate vacancies are down by around a third. But this is not what our employer members are telling us here at the ISE.

To get a clearer picture of what is happening at present, we conducted a pulse survey with ISE employers.

Have graduate jobs nose-dived?

Here are the headlines.

• Of the 69[i] employers who responded to the ISE last week, overall graduate vacancies are down 7%
• Yet when asked about school leaver roles, vacancies are up 23%

If we add the ISE graduate and school-leaver data together, we can see an overall increase of 1% in the student market.

Conscious that ISE data tends to focus on larger employers who run structured programmes, we collaborated with Group GTI to see if their data could help us understand the broader market by including other roles targeted at graduates[ii].

Their analysis paints a more positive picture:

• Data collated from nearly 90 university careers job boards, shows that job postings were actually up 8% during the 2024/5 hiring season vs 2023/4.

As ISE and Group GTI data is calculated differently (one is vacancy numbers, the other job postings), we can’t merge them to create an overall figure.

Is AI replacing entry level jobs?

Our conclusion is that the market may be challenging but not showing a significant drop in recruiting. And no-one is telling us that AI is replacing student jobs – although that’s not to say employers aren’t reviewing the situation.

Whilst the recruitment market is not in overall growth, some sectors are increasing hiring slightly, some are pulling back – and many are recruiting at the same rate as last year.

Some employers appear to be decreasing graduate roles and increasing school leaver hiring, but we’ll need to wait for the results of our full recruitment survey to understand the full picture.

What do we need to tell students?

This isn’t to minimise the challenge that students face when looking for work. Group GTI data reports a 44% increase in application volumes which builds on the 59% increase the ISE reported in 2024 – up to 140 applications per graduate job.

Our advice to students remains the same:

• The student market is always competitive and you need to treat your job search like a job
• Build your skills and experiences alongside your academic studies
• Make full use of your careers service to help you, whether you haven’t a clue what you want to do or have a specific career path in mind

Dan Doherty of Group GTI expects employer attraction strategies to shift, “We’re seeing employers focus more on methods to identify, target and engage with talent more tactically before going live. This will help reduce the application to hire ratios driven in part by the AI-enabled candidate.”

You’ll have recently received the link to the annual recruitment survey. We look forward to analysing your data and bringing you detailed analysis at the end of the recruiting season.