Companies are reversing course on hiring graduates

AI gets all the blame for the lack of opportunities for graduates, but the companies now reversing course might be the most important hiring story nobody is telling

I have two kids who graduated from university over the past couple of years, and watching them navigate the job market has been one of the more quietly difficult things I’ve experienced as a parent. Both sharp, both driven, both completely wrongfooted by a landscape that shifted in ways nobody warned them about when they enrolled.

The data confirms what I witnessed in real time. Only 30% of 2025 graduates secured a full-time job in their field, down from 41% the year before. Unemployment for young college graduates in the US hit 9.5% by September 2025, nearly double the general adult rate. Entry-level knowledge-work roles are vanishing, especially in fields most exposed to AI, with postings down roughly 35% since January 2023. The tasks AI does best happen to be exactly the tasks companies used to hand to their newest hires, and a lot of employers made a clean economic decision to stop making those hires.

They’re starting to regret it.

The companies that spent 2023 and 2024 cutting graduate intake, leaning on AI tools, and pushing junior work down onto senior teams are hitting a wall. Those tasks didn’t disappear when the junior hires did, they got absorbed by stretched senior employees, with the assumption that AI would fill the gap. Senior staff are burning out, and when they leave, the thinking is that AI will cover it. That logic looks clean in a restructuring deck, but in practice, it is producing flattened teams with little agency, endless rework cycles, and exhausted people juggling work at every level at once.

Here’s what’s becoming clear to the smarter operators. Graduates sitting on the outside of this market right now are not the liability that recent hiring decisions implied. For a company that has genuinely committed to AI, they may be the most interesting people to hire. Younger workers are far more AI-ready than their senior counterparts, learn faster, improve productivity more quickly, and cost significantly less. They haven’t spent a decade building workflows that need dismantling, they approach the tools without baggage, without the mental overhead of comparing everything to how things used to be done. The AWS CEO called replacing junior hires with AI one of the dumbest things he’d ever heard, precisely because graduates are the cheapest and most enthusiastically tool-native part of any workforce.

These two kids happen to be in England, which adds its own layer of difficulty. A lethally weakened post-Brexit economy, still absorbing consequences that the people who voted for it promised would never materialise, compounded every one of these trends, but the core dynamic is the same whether you’re graduating in London or New York.

This is shaping how I think about building our team. Some of the most efficient, most capable people we have are the ones shaping our intelligence, our ways of working, the unique insights that get clients into the top 20% of outcomes rather than the middle of the pack. The AI executes at scale, but the edge comes entirely from the human layer on top of it.

It’s a bit like Google’s Performance Max. Turning PMax on will find the middle of the market and settle there, optimising toward the average because that’s what’s in Google’s best interests! The brands getting exceptional results are the ones feeding it superior audience signals, sharper creative thinking, and better first-party data. The AI amplifies whatever intelligence you put in. If your ambition is average, there are easier ways to get there. If you want to lead, the quality of the human thinking wrapped around the AI is the difference.

That’s what makes this generation of graduates genuinely interesting as a talent pool. They’re not intimidated by the tools, and they haven’t calcified around ways of working that predate them. Paired with the right mentorship and a team that knows what good actually looks like, they can reach high-quality output faster than most hiring managers are currently willing to believe.

The job market right now is genuinely hard, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the people living it, but the companies worth working for are the ones figuring out that the answer to AI isn’t fewer humans, it’s better-positioned ones.

Dax is the Co-Founder & CEO @ FOMO.ai, and the author of 84Futures.com. This post was helped by Hello Gordon, the easiest way to articulate your expert knowledge.