{"id":48151,"date":"2025-09-28T05:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T05:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/48151\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T05:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T05:26:07","slug":"yes-todays-jobs-market-is-tough-for-graduates-but-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/48151\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, today\u2019s jobs market is tough for graduates \u2013 but AI …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vincent Peters came close to putting his engineering career on hold last week. He had applied for 73 jobs after graduating with a master’s in space engineering in September.<\/p>\n

Most applications were rejected outright, with 34 employers not even bothering to respond. But then he got a call from a recruiter with a job offer.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was getting to the point where I was about to give up on the engineering job hunt and start applying to coffee shops again,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I was really fortunate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peters, 26, had to deal with a lot of rejection \u2013 but it seems he had an easier time than many other graduate job hunters. He posted about his experiences on a Reddit forum about UK employment, including a flow chart breaking down his applications into unanswered, rejections and interviews.<\/p>\n

The comments were revealing: many were surprised he had got a job after so few applications. The most popular response was: \u201c9 interviews out of 73 applications is an insanely high ratio, well done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recent headlines have suggested that today\u2019s graduates face a more difficult job market, partly because AI might be replacing entry-level jobs. But while most analysts accept it\u2019s tough for current graduates, there\u2019s not much evidence that it\u2019s especially tough \u2013 or that AI is to blame. Stephen Isherwood, chief executive of the Institute of Student Employers (ISE), which represents about 300 graduate employers, believes the jobs market is probably the reason many new graduates are struggling to find a job, not AI. \u201cIt\u2019s a tough economic climate that\u2019s making employers reluctant to hire, not just at a graduate level, but actually across the board,\u201d he said.<\/a><\/p>\n

The data suggests he\u2019s correct. The two basic measures of slack in the labour market \u2013 unemployment and the number of unemployed people for each vacancy \u2013 are relatively low, indicating it\u2019s a tight market.<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s also little evidence that graduates are significantly worse off now than in the past. For instance, the latest available data\ufeff shows the employment rate among<\/a> 21 to 30-year-old graduates was 86.5% in 2024, much closer to before the financial crisis (86.9% in 2007), than during and after it (83.6% in 2009).<\/p>\n

The employment rate for 21 to 30-year-olds with degrees is higher than for young people overall, non-graduates in the same age bracket and the general public. They are also less likely to be unemployed or economically inactive.<\/p>\n

Data drawn from nearly 90 university career job boards suggested there were 8% more job openings during the 2024\/25 hiring season compared with 2023\/24. There\u2019s some evidence that the way employers are seeking out recent graduates is changing, and previous measures of graduate employment are not capturing the reality as accurately as they used to.<\/p>\n

Isherwood says data analysis of graduate jobs may be missing the changing way roles are advertised. He says employers increasingly do not specify \u201cgraduate\u201d as they want to attract a wide range of recruits: \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean that the job isn\u2019t skilled and it doesn\u2019t mean that a graduate won\u2019t get the job, but it might mean that graduate is not in the job title.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is not the only expert questioning the AI doom-mongering. According to Charlie Ball, a specialist on the graduate labour market at Jisc, much of the talk is \u201coverblown\u201d.<\/p>\n

He says there has been a change in employer behaviour that aggregators of vacancy statistics haven\u2019t yet registered. \u201cA lot of businesses are bringing recruitment in-house or going directly through universities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of AI, they say, any pause on hiring graduates is a culmination of factors, including higher payroll taxes, high inflation, and a reversal of a post-Covid hiring boom in some industries. The impact of AI on the job applications process as distinct from job openings is perhaps a little clearer. Competition for graduate jobs hit a record high in 2024, with the average employer receiving 140 applications per job, a near 60% increase on 2023.<\/p>\n

Peters used AI to help generate rough cover letters, which he would edit. \u201cI\u2019d [ask an AI to] give me four paragraphs for a job using my CV based on a [previous] cover letter \u2026 and then I would tailor it from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The responses to his Reddit post suggest some may be using AI more crudely: to produce hundreds of applications every year. \u201cA lot of people replied saying \u2018I\u2019ve applied to 400 companies\u2019 and \u2018I’ve applied to 500 companies\u2019 … unless they\u2019re working 30 hours a week, applying constantly, it seems more likely that they\u2019re using AI to pump out applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

The upshot, says Ball, is some candidates \u201cdon’t even know what job they\u2019ve applied for\u201d.<\/p>\n

AI might not be driving the recruitment downturn, but it could still have the final say on the availability of entry-level jobs. \u201cMy best take is that AI is not yet actually replacing a lot of tasks or a lot of people. It is creating time savings for individuals in specific tasks,\u201d says Tera Allas, author of a McKinsey report about automation and the UK job market.<\/p>\n

Next week, he \ufeff starts his new role helping manufacture aerospace and industrial ball bearings, which go into trains, planes and helicopters. \u201cI\u2019m so relieved,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Photograph by Doug Moody\/Mirrorpix\/Getty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vincent Peters came close to putting his engineering career on hold last week. He had applied for 73…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[72,61,60,150],"class_list":["post-48151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jobs","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jobs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}