Graduate recruitment is down by a fifth, and careers advisers are rewriting their advice in real time.
Employers across Calder took on roughly 21 per cent fewer graduates this autumn than a year ago, according to figures gathered by the Calder Chamber of Commerce from 140 member firms. The sharpest falls were in accountancy, legal services, marketing and software, the four sectors that have adopted automated drafting and analysis tools most quickly. In some firms the entry-level intake has simply disappeared: of the 32 practices that hired trainee paralegals last year, eleven hired none this time.
The survey, published on Wednesday, asked firms why. The most common answer was not cost but workload. Tasks that once filled the first two years of a junior’s career – summarising contracts, reconciling accounts, writing first drafts of reports, checking code for routine errors – are now handled in minutes by software that senior staff supervise. Several respondents said they were still unsure whether the change would last, but most did not expect to return to their old intake numbers.
Inside the firms
At a mid-sized accountancy practice on Exchange Street, the graduate scheme has shrunk from nine places to three. The partner responsible for recruitment, Gareth Lyle, said the decision had been agonising. The firm had always relied on trainees to do the volume work at year-end, he said, and those trainees had become managers and partners a decade later. Now the volume work is done by the tools, and the question of where the next generation of partners will come from has no easy answer.
“We have cut the bottom rung off the ladder and we are all pretending we can still climb it. I do not think anyone in this industry has worked out what an apprenticeship looks like when the machine does the apprentice’s job.”
Lyle’s concern is shared in the software sector. A developer on the Harrow business park, which employs about 1,200 people, said it had stopped recruiting junior testers altogether and was instead asking experienced engineers to review automated output. The firm’s head of engineering, Priyanka Desai, said the quality of the code had improved but that she worried about a “missing middle” in five years’ time, when the company needs mid-level staff who learned the trade by doing exactly the work that no longer exists.
Advisers rewrite the script
At Calder University’s careers service, the advice handed to final-year students has been rewritten twice since the summer. The service’s director, Ewan McCrory, said the old guidance – apply widely, polish your CV, expect a structured training scheme – no longer matches what students find. His team now encourages students to build a portfolio of real work before they graduate, to look harder at smaller firms that still need generalists, and to treat familiarity with automated tools as a basic skill rather than a specialism.
The careers service has also changed what it measures. Instead of reporting the share of graduates in “professional employment” six months after leaving, it now tracks how many are in roles that involve supervising or checking automated work, a category that did not exist in its records two years ago. Early figures suggest about one in eight graduates in business and law subjects are already in such roles, often on short contracts.
Students themselves describe a market that feels unstable rather than closed. A final-year economics student, who asked not to be named because she is mid-way through applications, said she had sent 46 applications since September and been invited to three interviews, each of which included a test asking her to critique a report written by software. “They are not hiring people to write any more,” she said. “They are hiring people to spot what the machine got wrong.”
What City Hall can and cannot do
The regional skills board, which advises the Assembly on training budgets, met on Thursday to discuss the figures. Its members are weighing a proposal to subsidise “bridging placements” of six months for graduates in small firms, with the region covering half of the wage. The scheme would cost about £2.4 million a year and could fund roughly 400 placements. Critics on the board argue that it risks paying firms to do what they would have done anyway, and that the money would be better spent on mid-career retraining for staff whose roles are also being reshaped.
There is also a broader debate about whether the fall is permanent. The Chamber’s chief economist noted that graduate hiring fell by a similar margin during the last downturn and recovered within three years. This time the trigger is different, and the firms surveyed were, for the most part, profitable and growing. That, more than the headline number, is what has unsettled careers advisers: the jobs are not disappearing because business is bad, but because business is managing without them.
