Graduate jobs crisis: Here’s who is actually still hiring in 2026
The job market is looking bleak. For recent graduates it’s not just a downturn, but a great big wall blocking off access to an early career. But in a vicious, Darwinian struggle for a meagre handful of jobs, there could still be advantages for grads.
The whippersnapper hiring slowdown is a many-headed beast, but the crisis can broadly be pinned on three factors: Cost pressures on businesses, strategic paralysis from economic uncertainty and automation of low-level tasks.
Some good news on that first point: If you’ve just graduated from uni, you’re (relatively) cheap. Not cheap in the sense that you’d dodge getting a round in on your first thirsty Thursday in the Square Mile, but more that you don’t cost as much.
It’s certainly not as cheap as it was to hire a grad a few years ago. In fact, costs have jumped seven per cent since the government’s national insurance tax raid. But it’s all relative, and grads are still a lot cheaper to hire than those with a few years experience.
So, if you’re a grad looking for a sure thing, you would ideally be looking to resolve the other two. You want something relatively high-growth, involving tasks that will be difficult to automate.
Forget McKinsey, consider a start-up?
On high-growth, a start-up could – for obvious reasons – fit this bill. And, a culture of get-stuck-in avoids the trap of entering a menial, siloed role that could be swiftly AI-ed away.
Kabir Bali, who co-founded the start-up talent incubator Jumpstart, told Morning Wire that there is a “big opportunity” for ambitious grads willing to embed themselves in core functions at early stage businesses.
“They can be scrappy, they can work things out. And I think more importantly, they’re much more likely to be AI-native, which I think is the big advantage that graduates probably have now, more so than people with eight, ten years of experience.”
Jumpstart sifts through around 1,000 CVs each month and accepts less than one per cent of applicants. Bali says the firm is on the hunt for grads with good degrees from top unis, but particularly looks out for sports, clubs and societies.
He said: “We’re looking for people who’ve been, you know, society presidents, who’ve tried to set up their own thing and failed.
“If they’re a developer, for example, they’ve got loads of projects they’ve posted on their GitHub where they’ve tried to launch a product and sell it to customers, or even smaller things like you’ve been captain of your university sports team or you’ve been really involved in charities.
“That stuff is so much more interesting to us.”
Not your father’s grad scheme
Bali thinks that cultural expectations around what represents a prestigious early career path could be gradually changing.
“If you look at the US, for example, I think startups are very much seen as a very legitimate path to go after university.”
This current dearth of graduate opportunities could, then, force a shake-up in how students and universities view the jobs market.
As it stands, the familiar big names still dominate the rankings of graduate employers. The Civil Service remains – far and away – the top grad hirer in the UK, with the NHS also up there in the top three.
But sources suggest that departments across the board are increasingly bringing up the drawbridge following a pandemic-era hiring spree. Nigel Farage’s poll-topping Reform UK has routinely pledged to take a Doge-style chainsaw to the “blob”.
Consultancies are down but not out
This is certainly not to say that recent uni-leavers should overlook the major grad-scheme routes – from banking to consultancy and accountancy – with PwC and Deloitte still the top private sector destinations for graduates.
These firms may still be leading the charts, but they are simply not hiring as much. PwC UK graduate applications are up 35 per cent this year, while their latest cohort was slimmed down by 200 places.
Oxfordshire-based consultancy Newton is still bullish on hiring grads. It’s a mid-sized firm that punches above its weight on hiring university leavers. Tom Herron, Newton’s talent acquisition director, told Morning Wire that “graduates bring fresh perspective and challenge”.
Herron is more optimistic amidst worries of a grad-pocalypse. “Graduate hiring has always been cyclical. Confidence shifts and volumes rise and fall with it.
“What has changed is the pace of expectation. Employers need people to contribute sooner, so the bar on core skills and commercial awareness is higher.”
There will always be a market for grads
For Newton, the steady flow of young talent is essential: “Without early investment, the leadership pipeline simply doesn’t exist.”
So, the message for grads is fairly simple: You’ve been dealt a rougher hand than any cohort for decades. The competition for a job, and the expectations as and when you start that job, are simply higher than for your elder Gen Z and Millennial forebears.
But, if you look for jobs in sectors that play to the innate strengths of graduates – AI experience, flexibility and digital entrepreneurialism – it could be that this current moment is more of a blip than a cataclysm.
A common mantra levelled at young people in the workplace is “make yourself indispensable”. That looks to have gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have.