More than a third of UK employers cut entry level roles in the past year, and mid sized companies cut faster than anyone else. Work Foundation research published in August 2026 found that 48 per cent of medium sized employers reduced entry level jobs, ahead of large employers on 46 per cent and double the rate of small firms on 24 per cent. The cost of that decision does not land this year. It lands in 2029, when the bench you did not build is the bench you have to buy.
If you run people strategy in a UK business of fifty to two hundred employees, entry level hiring is the quietest line on your workforce plan. Nobody argues for it in a board meeting. When budgets tighten and AI absorbs the routine work, the junior role is the easiest thing not to replace.
I have hired across four continents, and this is the pattern UK employers repeat most reliably. The decision is never announced. It happens by omission. A leaver is not backfilled. An intake is paused. A graduate role is upgraded to a mid level one because the shortlist looked stronger. Twelve months later nobody can point to the meeting where the company decided to stop growing its own people, and yet that is what happened. The 2026 data now makes the scale of it visible, and the picture for mid sized UK employers is not flattering.
| A note on scope This article covers workforce strategy and hiring practice. Where it refers to regulation or regulatory guidance, it does so as context and direction of travel, not as legal instruction. I am a talent acquisition practitioner and not a lawyer. If you are assessing how automated screening applies to your own recruitment process, take advice from a qualified data protection or employment specialist. |
Because a frozen hiring market and rapid AI adoption arrived together, and the junior role is where those two pressures meet. When there is no headcount growth and software absorbs the routine tasks a junior used to learn on, the role stops looking like an investment and starts looking like an optional cost.
The market context is clear. The Office for National Statistics put UK vacancies at 707,000 for May to July 2026, the lowest since spring 2021, with 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy. The CIPD Labour Market Outlook published in August 2026 found the net employment balance at plus nine, with only 26 per cent of employers expecting staffing to rise next quarter. CIPD economist James Cockett described it as a low hire, low fire environment that increasingly looks like the new normal.
Underneath that, the entry level layer has been thinning for far longer than the current slowdown. Work Foundation analysis found average weekly starter vacancies, meaning roles genuinely accessible to a first time entrant, fell by 49 per cent between 2016 to 2017 and 2025 to 2026. By late 2025 there was roughly one starter vacancy for every three young people not in education, employment or training. House of Commons Library figures show 1.01 million people aged 16 to 24 were NEET in January to March 2026, the first time above a million since 2013.
The reasoning most employers apply is rational on a twelve month view. Almost nobody runs the same numbers on a thirty six month view.
Medium sized employers, at 48 per cent. Not large corporates, and not small firms. The Work Foundation survey of 1,001 UK senior business leaders found companies in the middle of the size range cutting entry level roles at the highest rate of any group, while having less capacity to support the young people they do bring in.
The survey was carried out by Survation between 7 and 20 May 2026 and published by the Work Foundation at Lancaster University on 26 August. The size breakdown is the finding almost entirely overlooked in the coverage that followed.
| Employer size | Cut entry level roles in past year | Say AI or automation reduced those roles |
| Small, under 50 staff | 24 per cent | 24 per cent |
| Medium | 48 per cent | Between small and large |
| Large, 250 or more staff | 46 per cent | 60 per cent |
| All employers | 36 per cent | 43 per cent |
The report also identifies a capacity and opportunity gap. Eighty per cent of large employers say they could support a young person out of education and work for six months or more, against 44 per cent of small employers. On supporting young people with a long term health condition or disability into work, it is 78 per cent against 40 per cent.
Put those findings together and the position for a UK SME is uncomfortable. You are closing entry routes at corporate speed without corporate infrastructure. The large employer that pauses its graduate intake still has an early careers team, a development programme and a mentoring framework waiting for the day it turns hiring back on. Most companies of fifty to two hundred people have none of that. When you decide to rebuild, you rebuild from nothing.
Both, and the difference decides whether your decision is sound. AI removes tasks. It does not remove the need for people who can exercise judgement, and it does not create those people. Across UK employers, 43 per cent say AI or automation has reduced entry level roles, rising to 60 per cent among large employers and 24 per cent among small ones.
That gradient says less about what AI can do than about who could afford to deploy it at scale. The more useful question is what is left in the role once the routine work is automated, and the honest answer is that the job becomes harder. Checking an AI output requires more subject knowledge than producing the first draft ever did. If you automate the routine work and leave the job description untouched, you have built a role that demands senior thinking and pays junior money, and then concluded that young people are not ready for it.
A second finding in the same survey should stop any hiring leader in their tracks. Forty four per cent of UK employers have used AI or automated systems to screen applications, while 63 per cent still prioritise educational qualifications and 62 per cent prior work experience. Those are the two things a first time entrant structurally cannot have. Automating a filter built on proxies does not make it fairer. It makes it faster and more consistent, which is a problem when what it consistently does is screen out the people you say you cannot find.
For how those filters go wrong in practice, and what to check inside your own process, see my earlier article on AI CV screening in the UK.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has been signalling that employers underestimate how much of their recruitment decision making is genuinely automated. Its Recruitment Rewired work, drawn from voluntary engagement with more than 30 employers, points in a clear direction on transparency, meaningful human involvement and bias monitoring. Practitioners are broadly recommending that employers document where automation sits in the process early.
It costs you the middle of your organisation. Every mid level hire you make in 2029 is someone another employer trained, and you will pay a premium because everyone else stopped training too. The saving is visible this year. The bill arrives quietly and is rarely traced back to the decision that caused it.
This rarely reaches the board pack, because the two numbers sit in different years and different budget lines. The cost avoided is a salary. The cost incurred is a recruitment premium, a longer time to hire, a weaker succession position and a thinner internal pool for every promotion you run.
The retention argument is the stronger one. People who joined at the start of their career and were developed by you tend to stay longer than those bought in at mid level from a competitor. They understand how the business works, and they have relationships no external hire arrives with. Stop hiring at entry level and you lose the group most likely to still be there in five years.
The organisations handling this well are also getting better at moving the people already there. I have written about how skills mapping surfaces adjacent roles your team could grow into in internal mobility for UK SMEs, and about seeing the gap before it becomes urgent in skills gap analysis for UK SMEs.
One further point. The Work Foundation found 60 per cent of employers agree young people aged 16 to 24 are generally ready for work, against 17 per cent who disagree. The readiness objection raised in hiring conversations is not the majority view of employers. It is a story the process tells about itself.
Redesign the role before you decide it is redundant. In a market where AI has absorbed the routine work, an entry level job that still reads like a 2019 job description will fail, and the failure will look like a bad hire rather than a bad design. Five changes make the difference.
None of this requires an early careers function or a graduate scheme. It requires you to treat the entry level role as a design problem rather than a cost line, which is a shift in thinking rather than budget. The employers who come out of this strongest will not be the ones who automated fastest. They will be the ones who worked out what the junior role becomes when the routine work disappears, and built that version of it while everyone else was quietly deciding not to.
Medium sized employers are. Work Foundation research published in August 2026 found 48 per cent of medium sized employers reduced entry level roles over the previous twelve months, compared with 46 per cent of large employers and 24 per cent of small employers. Small firms are holding entry routes open most consistently, which is why the headline figure of 36 per cent across all employers understates the position for mid sized businesses.
It is one of several reasons and its weight varies sharply by employer size. Across all UK employers, 43 per cent say investment in AI or automation has reduced entry level roles. Among large employers that figure is 60 per cent, and among small employers 24 per cent. The wider hiring freeze, rising employment costs and a vacancy level at its lowest since spring 2021 all pull in the same direction.
Assess the capability directly instead of using a proxy for it. A short, role relevant work sample tells you more about how someone thinks than a degree classification does, and it is far more defensible if a candidate asks how the decision was made. Define no more than three capabilities that genuinely predict performance and build the assessment around those.
GOV.UK guidance sets out a hiring payment of up to two thousand pounds from 1 October 2026 for employers who do not pay the apprenticeship levy and who recruit new apprentices aged 16 to 24, alongside government funding towards apprenticeship training costs for younger apprentices. Eligibility depends on your annual pay bill and other conditions, and the rules are still being updated, so confirm your position against the current GOV.UK apprenticeship funding rules before building it into a plan.
| About the author Sabiha is a Talent Acquisition Director, speaker and author with more than 16 years of hiring experience across the UK, Dubai, South Africa and Malaysia. She helps UK organisations move past reactive hiring and build workforce strategies that hold up for the long run, using AI alongside human judgement. Shortlisted as Best Career Coach UK by the CDI, she has helped businesses improve the way they hire and retain talent. |
Global Talent. Ethical AI. Strategic Hiring. Sustainable Retention.
