Welcome to October’s Strategy Pulse.

It’s graduate recruitment season. So it’s a good moment to look at who’s actually getting through the door, and how many fewer people that is than three years ago.

For a while, cutting junior hiring looked like a sensible response to a tough market and a lot of new AI tooling. Sharp savings, no visible damage. The damage just takes about a decade to show up.

Big Shift: The Bottom Rung Goes Missing

The entry-level market has had a rough year. Indeed’s mid-year data showed UK job postings down 11% between January and mid-July, with graduate roles at their weakest mid-year level since 2020. The Work Foundation found 36% of UK employers had cut entry-level jobs for 16 to 24-year-olds over the previous year. Competition was already fierce before this year’s slowdown: by 2024, each graduate vacancy was drawing 140 applications on average, the highest the ISE has recorded since it started counting in 1991.

AI gets most of the blame, and it deserves some. Large employers are the most likely to say AI or automation has reduced their entry-level roles. But slow growth and the cost of hiring are doing at least as much damage.

Whatever the cause, the effect is the same. Junior roles were never only about output. Drafting the first version of the deck, building the model that gets torn apart, sitting in on the client call: that’s how people learned to make judgement calls. Automate the grunt work and you also remove the training ground, unless someone deliberately rebuilds it.

And the demand for AI skills keeps rising, featuring in a record 9.4% of UK job adverts this summer. Employers want people who can check, question and improve AI output. That’s a senior skill, and it’s usually learned by doing junior work first.

📌 Takeaway: Every junior role you cut this year is a manager you’ll have to buy in from outside in 2032.

Brand in Focus: Azets Hires Against the Grain

While most of its sector trimmed graduate intakes, Azets went the other way. Last autumn the advisory and accountancy group took on 384 graduates and school leavers across the UK, a 15% rise in accountancy graduate hiring on the year before.

It hasn’t ignored AI. The new intake started in advisory roles at the same time as the firm was automating some of the tasks juniors used to do. CEO Peter Gallanagh was blunt about the choice: plenty of firms are replacing junior staff with AI, while Azets is using the technology to improve what its juniors do rather than replace them.

The structure behind it matters as much as the headline number. Its school leaver route runs for six years and stacks two apprenticeships on the way to a chartered qualification. That’s a long-term bet on growing your own people, at a time when competitors are betting they’ll be able to hire experience later.

Azets serves SMEs and regional businesses, where a steady supply of trained advisors is the product. Its bet is that being one of the few firms still training people at scale becomes an advantage once everyone else needs mid-level staff at once.

📌 Takeaway: In a market where everyone is cutting the bottom, still training people becomes a competitive position, and a recruitment pitch.

Consulting Corner: The Diamond Needs Filling

Consulting built its economics on the pyramid: hire lots of graduates, filter them hard, promote a few to partner. The Big Four have been reshaping it. Between 2023 and 2024 they cut their UK graduate and school leaver intakes by between 6% and 29%, with KPMG cutting the most, from 1,399 to 942. AI wasn’t the only reason. All four have also been moving work to lower-cost hubs in India, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The shape replacing the pyramid is usually described as a diamond: a thinner base and a wider middle of experienced specialists and managers, because AI still can’t make the judgement calls.

The part that gets less attention is where that wider middle comes from. A diamond needs more people at manager and senior manager level, and fewer people coming up through the firm to fill those roles. So firms will have to buy that experience from outside, and they’ll be competing with everyone else who made the same call. Mid-level hiring gets tighter and more expensive, and the firms that kept training juniors find their people being poached.

There’s a succession problem underneath too. Cut entry intake by a quarter and you’ve cut the pool your partners of 2040 will come from by roughly the same amount. Nobody has a proven fix for that yet.

📌 Takeaway: A thinner base and a fuller middle sounds efficient on a slide. In practice it moves the hiring pressure up a level, where it costs more.

🔔 Final Thought

Cutting graduate hiring shows up as a saving straight away. The cost turns up years later as a gap in the middle of the organisation, when there’s no one ready to step up and the external market is full of firms looking for the same people.

The businesses that come out ahead won’t necessarily hire more juniors. They’ll be clear about what junior roles are now for, and they’ll design the learning back into them on purpose.

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