London, September 2025
The graduate job hunt of 2025 has turned into a numbers game no individual can win. In the UK, the average graduate vacancy now draws a level of competition not seen in three decades. In the US, a market that was supposed to keep growing instead flatlined. And on both sides of the Atlantic, the graduates living through it have drawn the obvious conclusion: the system is not working for them.
This is not a story about lazy or unqualified graduates. It is a story about a broken funnel — too many applicants pouring through a screening process built for a smaller, slower world. According to Ewance, a challenge-based learning-and-recruiting platform where students solve real-world challenges tied to their field of study and earn verifiable certificates, the volume has reached the point where the résumé, as a way of telling candidates apart, has effectively stopped working.
A 30-year record no graduate wanted
The headline figure is brutal. The Institute of Student Employers (ISE) reports that UK graduate employers received an average of 140 applications per vacancy in 2025 — the highest level of competition in 30 years. In the most sought-after sectors the crush is worse still, with retail, FMCG and similar employers fielding closer to 290 applications for every opening.
Behind the ratio is a squeeze from both directions: the ISE also reports that the number of graduate vacancies fell by around 8% on the year. More applicants, chasing fewer jobs, through the same narrow door.
At 140 applications per vacancy, the résumé screen breaks in both directions. Strong candidates get filtered out by noise, and recruiters drown in paper they cannot possibly read properly. Nobody is served by a process operating at that volume.
— Ewance's founder
The maths of a broken funnel
Consider what 140:1 actually means for the people inside it. A recruiter cannot meaningfully assess 140 applications per role; they triage. That triage rewards whatever is easy to scan — a recognisable university, a familiar employer name, the right keywords — and penalises the things that are hard to see on paper, which is to say most of what actually predicts good work.
For the graduate, the rational response to long odds is to apply to more roles, which raises the volume for everyone, which lengthens the odds again. It is a classic arms race, and like all arms races it makes everybody worse off. The application has become so cheap to send that it has stopped carrying information.
Did the US fare any better?
Barely. In the United States, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) had projected graduate hiring would grow by 7.3% for the Class of 2025. By its spring update, that projection had collapsed to just 0.6% — a market that, in practical terms, flatlined. Graduates who did everything they were advised to do walked into a market that had effectively stopped expanding.
A near-zero growth market changes the maths of a job search completely. When there are no new openings to absorb a record graduating class, the competition for existing roles intensifies — and the premium on standing out rises with it.
The class of 2025 did everything right and the market still said no. When hiring growth falls from 7% to under 1%, another well-written résumé is not the answer. Proof of what you can actually do is.
— Ewance's founder
The confidence crash
The human cost shows up in how graduates feel about their prospects. According to Handshake, 57% of the Class of 2025 said they felt pessimistic about starting their careers — up sharply from 49% the year before. Over the same period, students responded to the tougher market by sending roughly a quarter more applications each, feeding the very overload that fuels their pessimism.
It is a demoralising loop: the harder the market, the more applications students fire off; the more applications flood the system, the less any single one can land. Graduates can feel the game is rigged against effort — because, mechanically, it is.
Why does throwing more applications at it make it worse?
Because volume is the disease, not the cure. Every additional low-cost application a candidate sends adds to the pile a recruiter must triage, which pushes recruiters toward cruder filters, which makes individual merit even harder to surface. The result is a market that is simultaneously exhausting for graduates and unsatisfying for employers — who, even amid record application numbers, still report struggling to identify the candidates who can actually do the job.
The way out of an arms race is not more ammunition. It is a different signal — one that does not get cheaper the more people send it, because it cannot be mass-produced.
So what actually gets a graduate picked?
If the résumé has stopped carrying information, the thing that breaks the deadlock is evidence the pile cannot fake: a visible record of real problems solved. That is the premise Ewance was built on. It runs challenge-based projects with university students — open-ended problems tied to their field — so a graduate can arrive not with another identical CV, but with verifiable proof of work a recruiter can actually inspect.
Its read on the squeeze is grounded in the field. Ewance's founder has spent more than a decade at the intersection of education and industry, and the 2025 data matches what the platform sees: in a market drowning in applications, the graduates who get picked are the ones who can show, not just claim.
When there are 140 applications for a job, the winning move is not to make it 141. It is to bring something the other 140 cannot — proof of real work, that a recruiter can verify. That is the only thing that still cuts through at this volume.
— Ewance's founder
Recommendations
Ewance's founder offered the following for graduates and the employers trying to hire them:
- Stop competing on volume. In a 140:1 market, more applications lower everyone’s odds, including your own.
- Compete on proof. A verifiable record of demonstrated work is the signal that does not get cheaper the more people apply.
- For employers: fix the funnel, not the filter. Crude keyword screening at record volume filters out the candidates you most want to find.
- Build evidence before graduation. The time to assemble proof of real work is during study, not after the rejections start.
A generation did exactly what it was told and met the toughest graduate market in living memory. The fix is not to ask them to try harder at a broken game. It is to give them — and the employers hiring them — a signal that actually works.
— Ewance's founder
Sources
All figures are drawn from the original sources below; Ewance conducted no proprietary survey for this release. ISE data is UK-based; NACE and Handshake data is US-based.
- Institute of Student Employers (ISE), 2025 research — an average of 140 applications per graduate vacancy, the highest in 30 years (≈290 in retail/FMCG); graduate vacancies down approximately 8% year on year. UK.
- National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), Job Outlook 2025 Spring Update — Class of 2025 hiring projection revised down to +0.6%, from the +7.3% projected in autumn 2024. US.
- Handshake, Class of 2025 research — 57% of graduating students reported feeling pessimistic about starting their careers, up from 49% a year earlier; students sent roughly 24% more applications per job. US.
