Understanding the Graduate Job Market By Martin Birchall Managing Director, High Fliers Research
O ver the past quarter of a century since the first edition of The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers was published in 1999, graduate recruitment at the UK’s leading employers has increased very substantially. The number of graduate vacancies on offer to university-leavers has increased in seventeen of the past twenty-five years and reached a new record
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
level in 2022, with almost twice as many opportunities available, compared to graduate recruitment at the beginning of the new the millenium.
Britain’s 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 this sustained period of growth in graduate jobs has been punctuated by four significant downturns in recruitment.
“ Accounting & professional services firms will be the largest recruiter of new graduates in 2025, with over 6,500 roles on offer. ”
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 for new graduates by more than 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 unprecedented 23 per cent in less than 18 months – and almost 10,000 jobs were cut or left unfilled from a planned
But the start of the Coronavirus 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 over 700 planned vacancies were left unfilled. The final number of graduates recruited
TOP 100 GRADUATE EMPLOYERS 25
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