Understanding the Graduate Job Market By Martin Birchall Managing Director, High Fliers Research
S ince the first edition of The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers was published in 1999, the number of graduate vacancies on o!er to university-leavers has increased in sixteen of the past twenty-seven years. Graduate recruitment reached its highest- ever level in 2022, with almost twice as many opportunities available at the country’s top
jobs were cut or left unfilled from a planned intake of more than 40,000 new graduates during this period. A record fifty-nine of the employers featured in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers reduced their graduate hiring in 2009 alone. Although the graduate job market bounced back successfully in 2010, with an annual increase in vacancies of more than 12 per cent, it took a further
five years for graduate recruitment to return to the pre-recession peak recorded in 2007. The uncertainty that followed
employers, compared to vacancies at the beginning of the new millennium. But this sustained period of growth in graduate jobs has been punctuated
Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union in 2016 saw graduate vacancies dip again in 2017. But growth returned a year later and by 2019 entry-level recruitment was up by 43 per cent compared to the number of vacancies available in 2009 – the low point in graduate recruitment during the economic crisis – and had been expected to rise even higher in 2020. But the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020 forced the UK’s top employers to pause or re-evaluate their graduate recruitment and many were unable to continue with that year’s planned annual intake of university-leavers. Graduate recruitment was cut in thirteen out of fifteen industries and business sectors, most noticeably at major engineering & industrial companies and accounting & professional services firms, where
by five significant downturns. The latest four-year slump in recruitment means that vacancies for new graduates in 2027 are expected to be at their lowest level for sixteen years.
“ The number of graduate jobs at the country’s top employers has now fallen by more than a quarter since 2022. ”
In the two years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, the worsening economic outlook prompted employers in the UK to reduce their entry-level vacancies by over 15 per cent. Graduate recruitment recovered in 2004 and vacancies for university-leavers grew at between 10 and 12 per cent annually over the next three years, before the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 heralded the worst recession in the UK since the Second World War. Graduate vacancies at the country’s top employers plunged by an extraordinary 23 per cent in less than 18 months – and almost 10,000
TOP 100 GRADUATE EMPLOYERS 25
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