Ahead of his opening keynote at the ISE Early Talent Intelligence Summit, Toby Culshaw, author of Talent Intelligence and co-founder of the Talent Intelligence Collective, asks how well early careers teams really know their competition.
Ask any early careers team who they compete with for graduates and you'll get an answer in seconds. Usually five or six names, said with total confidence. Ask how they know, and the room tends to go a little quieter.
That's not a criticism. Most competitor lists are built from perfectly sensible things: the stands next to yours at careers fairs, the rankings, the firms your hiring managers worry about. The trouble is that all of those tell you who you're compared with. Very few tell you who you actually lose to.
A market that won't sit still
The last two years have made this matter more. ISE's latest Student Recruitment Report shows graduate hiring up 4% this cycle, after an 8% fall the year before. Look underneath that headline, though, and 45% of employers grew their intake while 40% cut theirs. In other words, two groups of employers are making opposite bets.
When a market splits like that, your competitor set changes whether you update your list or not.
The firm you fought for candidates three years ago may have halved its scheme, while one you've never thought about has doubled. And with 62% of employers seeing more graduates apply for school leaver roles, your competition for a graduate might now be someone else's apprenticeship.
Application volume, which plenty of us have quietly used as a measure of how well we're doing, has also stopped telling us much. At 141 applications per graduate vacancy, everyone is busy, and busy says very little about who you're beating.
Borrowing from the most competitive talent markets
In my day job I spend a lot of time tracking how talent moves between employers in some of the most fiercely contested markets there are, including the AI labs, where everyone is chasing the same few thousand people. The questions we ask there are simple, and they translate surprisingly well to graduates and interns.
The first is who you really lose candidates to. Whose offers do your candidates accept instead of yours?
Most applicant tracking systems capture offer declines, but usually as a free-text box or a vague reason code. Adding one structured question, ‘where are you going instead?’, turns that into one of the most useful datasets you'll own.
The second is where your graduates go once they leave. Somewhere between 18 months and three years in, the market starts to value what you've taught them. If a big share of your leavers land at one or two rivals, you may be running a very good training academy for someone else. Far better to learn that from your own data than from a spike in resignations.
The third is what your rivals' programmes look like from the outside in. Salaries, rotations, locations, qualifications, start dates, campus presence and where their alumni end up are all far more visible than most people assume. One page per rival, refreshed each cycle, goes a long way.
None of this needs a data science team. Most of the data is already sitting in your ATS, your leaver records and your LinkedIn alumni pages. What it needs is the right question and a bit of discipline about where the answers come from.
Be wary of the confident answer
Which brings me to the trap I worry about most. Ask an AI tool who your top five competitors for graduate talent are and you'll get a beautifully written answer in seconds.
It will probably match the list you already had, because both are built from the same thing: whatever is most widely written about. It sounds convincing right up to the moment someone senior asks where it came from.
So before you trust any answer, whether it comes from a tool, a vendor or a colleague, ask a few plain questions. Where does the data come from? What period does it cover? What is it being measured against? Could someone else reproduce it? AI is brilliant for speeding up the legwork. It just can't stand in for a method.
Bring your list
At the ISE Early Talent Intelligence Summit on 9 November I'll walk through how to test your competitor list, the data sources any early careers team can use, and how to turn what you find into decisions on intake size, campus targeting, pay and programme design.
Before then, try one small thing. Write down the five employers you think you compete with for graduates, put a date on it, and bring it with you. I suspect a few of us will be surprised.