Graduate vacancies in the UK have nearly halved in a year, falling to their lowest level since records began, as employers cut entry-level roles to manage rising costs and lean more heavily on AI.
Job site Adzuna listed 8,383 graduate vacancies in July, down from 15,397 at the same point last year. That is the lowest count since Adzuna started tracking the data in 2016, and a fraction of the 55,800 graduate roles it listed at the market’s 2017 peak. Competition has widened too: Adzuna found an average of 2.14 job seekers per vacancy across all experience levels in July, up from 1.93 a year earlier.
Employers point to two pressures pushing in the same direction. Rising employer national insurance contributions and minimum wage increases have made junior hires more expensive, and generative AI now handles work that once justified a graduate desk: first drafts, research summaries, basic analysis, entry-level coding. Andrew Hunter, Adzuna’s co-founder, said employers “still haven’t found a reason to open up hiring” for graduates.
Not everyone reads the numbers the same way. Charlie Ball, head of labour market intelligence at Jisc, which runs Prospects.ac.uk, said the fall may partly reflect fewer roles being advertised specifically as graduate positions, even as similar work still gets filled by graduates through general listings. He called the market “weak” and “not in great shape,” but stopped short of “collapsed.”
The wider picture backs up the weak read. UK youth unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds stood at 16.2% in the three months to March 2026, and more than a million young people are not in education, employment or training. Graduates job hunting have described applying to hundreds of roles without a response, and growing frustration with employers using AI to screen applications before a human ever sees them.
For an industry built on hiring creative and analytical talent straight out of university, this is a structural shift, not a blip. Marketing, media and communications roles sit squarely in the category of work AI now automates first: drafting copy, summarising research, building first-pass creative concepts. Employer branding and campus recruitment budgets built around graduate schemes will need to justify themselves against that backdrop.
Former government minister Alan Milburn is leading a review into youth unemployment, having already flagged the shrinking supply of entry-level and part-time jobs. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has changed public contract rules to require bidders to show job and training creation plans, and the government points to a £2.5 billion youth employment package it says will deliver almost a million opportunities to earn or learn. Whether either intervention reaches the graduate hiring pipeline before AI reshapes it further is the open question through the rest of this year.
