Phillip Hamnett, CEO and founder of TalentAid, explores how careers services can best support students and graduates searching for jobs outside the traditional hiring season
Applications for most 2027 graduate schemes open this autumn. Prospects' guide to graduate schemes says employers usually keep accepting them until the end of the year or early January, although some organisations close once their places are full. The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, free from careers services at more than 50 universities, says it features over 25,000 graduate vacancies at those employers for 2027.1
Yet most graduates start work away from those employers' programmes, often in a post advertised only when an employer needs someone. A graduate aiming at such posts needs a standing weekly routine, and careers services can support that second search as deliberately as they support the first.
If you advise a final-year student who wants to join a small architecture practice or a charity near home, the autumn calendar has little to offer them.
How big the season is
HESA's Graduate Outcomes survey of the class of 2023/24 went to 1,002,175 graduates of UK higher education at all levels.2 The Top 100's vacancies could be filled by only a small share of a cohort that size. The scheme market is also contracting: High Fliers Research reports that graduate recruitment at the country's top employers 'has been cut by almost a quarter in the past three years'.3
The Institute of Student Employers (ISE) describes the employers in its recruitment survey as 'mainly large businesses with formal graduate programmes and apprenticeships',4 and it has reported employers using shorter application windows to control record application volumes.5 Its head of insights, Claire Tyler, wrote on Luminate in December 2025 that 'many graduates are hired into less structured roles'.
Graduate recruitment as a whole is spread across a great many employers. The government's Employer Skills Survey 2024 put the share of workplaces that had taken on someone to their first job from university in the previous two to three years at 16% in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and 13% in Wales.6
Why that hiring follows the vacancy
A scheme recruits a cohort that starts together, so it needs a timetable. An employer filling one post recruits when someone leaves or the work grows. For the smallest workplaces, taking on a new entrant is occasional: in the Employer Skills Survey, only 17% of sites with two to four employees had recruited anyone leaving education in the last two to three years, against 85% of those with 100 or more.
Vacancies are open in every month, at employers of every size. The Office for National Statistics' single-month estimates7 of all vacancies, which are not seasonally adjusted and which it warns are volatile, never fell below 672,000 in any month from September 2025 to August 2026. Of the 702,000 in its early three-month estimate8 for June to August 2026, 91,000 were at businesses with fewer than ten employees and 240,000 at businesses with 2,500 or more, so the second search runs through large employers too.
What the second search needs
If you advise a final-year student who wants to join a small architecture practice or a charity near home, the autumn calendar has little to offer them. For that student, a week of searching might mean reading alerts from the job boards and employer pages that cover their field and area, checking a short list of target employers on a fixed day, sending applications within days of a post appearing, and recording what went where.
A routine can also help with two difficulties graduates report. Prospects Luminate's Early Careers Survey 2026, found that 69% of recent graduates named staying motivated as a struggle in their job search and 68% named finding opportunities to apply to; only having the required experience was named more often. The ISE's standing advice to students, in Claire Tyler's Luminate article, is to 'treat your job search like a job', which a fixed weekly slot puts into practice.
What careers services can add
The same survey asked those who had not used their university or college careers service in the previous 12 months why not; 28% said they planned to use it later, when applying for jobs. The report reads this as a case for engaging students earlier. On the second search, the point of applying can come in any month, including after graduation.
Manchester Metropolitan University already does part of this. Its graduate opportunities manager, Ashleigh Dawson, wrote on Luminate in December 2025 that it sends graduates targeted job communications by email and through social media groups, and runs interview events that bring SMEs and graduates together on campus for short, pre-arranged interviews.
A service could add a search-planning appointment in the spring term for finalists who are not applying to schemes, at which adviser and student set up alerts and agree how many hours a week the search will get. A bulletin of single-post vacancies, sent through the summer to those who have just graduated, would keep that routine supplied.
Notes
- The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers.
- Graduate Outcomes survey results, HESA, 2026.
- The Graduate Market Report, High Fliers.
- Apprenticeships rise as graduate vacancies drop 8%, ISE, 2025.
- How employers are actually managing record applications, ISE, 2026.
- Employer Skills Survey 2024, GOV.UK, 2025.
- X06: Single month vacancies estimates, ONS, 2026.
- VACS03: Vacancies by size of business, ONS, 2026.
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