British graduates are crushed

With unemployment rising and the student loans scandal deepening, job fairs have become a dark joke

Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images

I am standing in a crowd of people at Westfield Stratford City and I cannot move. All around me, visitors to the London Job Fair clutch branded tote bags, jostling to reach the stalls of businesses they hope will employ them. They lean and twist to catch recruiters’ eyes as if trying to get a drink at a crowded bar. At the other end of the fair, which consists of a plastic corridor on the shopping centre’s second floor, 40 or so people are waiting for a talk to begin. A screen displays a title slide: “Why no one is replying to your job applications”. The speaker due to deliver the presentation has not shown up. “I’m sorry, we’re still waiting for them,” a member of staff says into a microphone.

The number of people seeking permanent work rose last month, as permanent hiring continued to decrease. Unemployment in the UK is at its highest level since 2021, or since 2015 for those aged 16-24. The process of getting a job has become increasingly elusive, as hopeful graduates grappling with an average of £50,000 in student debt are felled by AI-determined keywords and mysterious algorithms. The air at the London Job Fair is muggy with desperation, though that could be the asphyxiating smell of Lush from a few shopfronts down. Still, hiring is, ultimately, controlled by humans. Visitors to the fair are here to hunt down the people who read their CV and stamp it naughty or nice. They are here to meet recruiters.

“I feel like Gandalf,” says Nick Gordon, who is 50 and has worked in the recruitment industry since he was 23. “I’ve been through lots of different economic problems, but recruiting companies have always seemed to survive.” At the tail end of the pandemic, business was booming: hiring reached record highs month after month and companies were willing to pay inflated salaries (and give recruiters large commissions) to attract candidates who had become difficult to find in the last two years. In July 2022, there were a record 1.85 million active job adverts in the UK.

In 2026, you might think recruiters occupy an even more powerful position. As job vacancies decrease and applications surge, these leviathans of LinkedIn can supposedly pluck an overqualified candidate from the thousands of CVs paraded before them. But, in reality, even the people doing the hiring can’t get hired.

Hiring has sunk below to pre-pandemic levels. Many young people no longer have the luxury of discerning between careers: at the fair today, the queue for the Royal Air Force stall has merged with that of its neighbour, the luxury beauty retailer, Space NK. A group of 19-year-olds are milling around a poster that asks if they’ve ever considered fostering a child. Between November 2019 and January 2020, there were 810,000 job vacancies in the UK; there were 726,000 between November 2025 and January 2026. This is supposedly due to a heady cocktail of geopolitical shocks that make companies uneasy about the future, paired with the cost to employers of increased minimum wage and National Insurance contributions. And when businesses aren’t looking to recruit, they have no need for recruiters. “Now, we can find people, but we can’t find customers,” says Gordon. “At the moment, it’s incredible the volume of [recruitment companies] that just cannot afford to carry on.” SThree, a global recruitment firm for Stem-based roles, cut its staff by 18 per cent last year after their fees plummeted in the UK. In 2025, Challenge Recruitment Group – which counted Tesco and Amazon as clients – was rescued from going under by a US firm, and owes £90m in unpaid taxes to HMRC. Gordon is no longer a recruiter; he now invests in recruitment companies at risk of insolvency.

Many people applying for a job are not interacting with recruiters or employers, despite their best efforts. One talk at the job fair promises to help you create a “future-ready CV” to combat an “AI-driven job market” (if you haven’t been convinced of a different path by the previous lecture: for anyone who has “dreamed of becoming a social influencer”). Dan Hawes, who founded the Graduate Recruitment Bureau in 1997, says young people applying for jobs are fed up with how impersonal the process has become, as chatbots and one-sided AI interviews have replaced communication between the company and the candidate. “They just want to speak to a human. But on the other side, for employers to deal with those rejections at scale is a huge task.” Job applications from graduates have doubled since 2023. Last year, 60,000 people applied for 2,000 entry-level positions at the accounting firm, PWC, a 35 per cent increase from the year before. Many of these applications will be strikingly similar. “It’s a real problem at the moment, because it is very easy to apply for jobs and some graduates are using AI to quickly churn out CVs. But for employers, they find they’re getting lots of samey-looking CVs,” Hawes says. “Initially they think, ‘Wow, we’ve got thousands of applications.’ But then they boil it down and they’re not quite what they’re looking for.”

When the British recruitment company Freshminds surveyed graduates applying to investment banks at the end of last year, two-thirds said they had used AI during the application process, whether to write cover letters or talk to ChatGPT for interview practice. Employers now use recruiters to weed out these AI-generated applications. Though some firms, like Freshminds, have recruiters do this task by hand, more often than not the job of figuring out which applications are aided by AI is handed over to, well, AI.

Saadiya, 23, works seasonally as an exam invigilator, but has been looking for a full-time job since the summer of 2024. She’s holding a biro in one hand and her job fair leaflet in another; she’s trying to visit every stall, and half are crossed out. Saadiya has started coming to job fairs to speak with people face to face, after the 30 applications she sent a week were largely met with silence. She says she never uses AI to write her cover letters, but her applications still sometimes get flagged as AI-generated. She thinks this is because she is trying to tailor them to meet the requirements of AI recruiting systems. “Candidates and clients are both trying AI, and then just shooting past each other,” says Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation. Beleaguered recruiters increasingly turn to AI to grapple with an onslaught of applications, and weary job hunters feel they must do the same to beat these systems.

Before the interview stage, AI sorts through CVs and cover letters, prioritising those containing certain key words which meet the job description. “Obviously, screening CVs can be problematic for diversity initiatives,” says Edith Carmichael, a recruiter at Freshminds. “What do you train the AI to filter out? Is it university? Is it clubs, societies? That all comes with slight problems.” In 2018, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool after it showed a preference for male candidates. It gets worse at the interview stage. An AI interviewer cannot shake an applicant’s hand, but it can score how empathetic they are, rate their facial expressions and time how long it takes them to respond to questions. Spark Hire, a popular one-way video hiring software, summarises candidates’ interview responses and scores them based on traits like communication, enthusiasm and motivation. There is no need for a real person to interview them. Instead, candidates speak into a one-way mirror in the hope of eventually conjuring a real person – a sort of corporate bloody Mary.

What candidates most want to know from recruiters, what they are always asking them, is how to “stand out”. The phrase recurs in my conversations with both recruiters and jobseekers. Get someone to proofread your CV, says Hawes, or reach out to someone at the company you’re applying to. If good spelling and a polite email fail (I’d guess that people sending 30 applications a week for over a year might have tried this), Hawes has another suggestion: “See if there’s some common person you’re connected with, maybe. It certainly helps if they maybe went to your university; that alumni connection can be quite powerful. Just to get noticed, not that they can favour you over anyone else… it’s a very inclusive process.” It’s not everyone’s definition of inclusive.

The journey to a career in 2026 is not unlike this job fair: a clogged, circuitous maze. The notion of a dream job is evaporating. Young people will dream of any job that might have them. This week, the government will begin to investigate how students have been gouged for the privilege of an education which no longer guarantees them a shot at employment. There is much talk of “broken promises”. But we have entered a landscape where young people are no longer promised anything – not even a rejection letter. Any ambition must be couched in a caveat: “I know there are so many people applying,” or, “I know I won’t get it.” And no one disagrees. One wonders what it will look like when – if – the exhausted people at this job fair do finally enter work, after they have been forced to compromise and contort themselves so much in order to do so. What social contract are they signing? The opportunity to labour and be compensated for it has become a luxury, and an increasingly rare one.

As I am about to leave the job fair, I approach two girls for a final interview. They are both 17, the youngest people I have spoken with so far, and visiting with their college. They’ve found it “hot and crowded”, they tell me, and quite overwhelming. They’re not quite applying to jobs yet. Nevertheless, “I think there are a lot of opportunities in there if you actually look into it,” one of them says. How do they feel about getting started? “Excited,” they say. I hope that feeling lasts.

[Further reading: Young people can’t get jobs. Does Labour care?]