If you graduated recently and the job search has felt unreasonable, it is worth knowing that you are not imagining it and it is not a personal failing. The entry-level market changed shape underneath your feet, and the numbers are stark enough that they are worth seeing in full.
The numbers
SignalFire’s 2025 talent report tracked hiring across large technology companies and startups. What it found:
Big tech
7%
of hires are new graduates — down 25% from 2023, and more than 50% below 2019.
Startups
<6%
of hires are new graduates — down 11% from 2023, and over 30% below 2019.
Startups hiring proportionally fewer juniors than large companies runs against everything the industry believes about itself. The scrappy early-stage company that takes a chance on raw talent is, statistically, taking fewer of those chances than Google.
It gets sharper. The share of new graduates landing roles at Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA or Tesla has more than halved since 2022. The Pragmatic Engineer found new graduates made up 10% of engineering hires at major US tech companies in 2025, down from nearly 30% in 2023 — and intern intake has fallen to roughly half its pre-2022 level.
That last detail is the one to sit with. Internships kept falling through a general hiring recovery. Companies started hiring again and simply did not restart the pipeline that creates juniors.
The experience paradox
SignalFire gives the trap its name. Companies post junior roles, then fill them with experienced people. The job exists. The listing is real. It is simply won by somebody with four years behind them who is willing to take it.
You need experience to get the job whose purpose is to give you experience.
This is not primarily about AI, and it is worth being accurate about that. It is mostly budgets, smaller funding rounds, and the quiet cancellation of graduate programmes — which are expensive, slow to pay back, and the first thing cut when a finance team wants savings that do not look like redundancies.
AI makes it worse at the margin, though, because of which work it absorbs. As covered in our piece on what AI is actually replacing, the exposed layer is the work where somebody else already decided what needed doing. That layer is the junior job description almost word for word.
The structural problem
Demand is concentrating at the senior end — 71% of recent growth in software postings came from senior roles. Meanwhile the rung people used to reach seniority is being removed. Those two facts are on a collision course, and nobody has explained who will be senior in 2035.
What this looks like in UK pay
Here is the part most coverage of this leaves out: what entry-level technology work actually pays in Britain, by region. The lower quartile is the best available proxy for early-career pay.
| Region | IT professionals | IT technicians |
|---|---|---|
| London | £51,963 | £34,415 |
| East of England | £44,211 | £28,441 |
| South East | £43,346 | £29,969 |
| North East | £42,954 | £23,785 |
| South West | £42,154 | £27,230 |
| West Midlands | £40,912 | £28,131 |
| East Midlands | £40,756 | £27,344 |
| North West | £40,297 | £30,617 |
| Scotland | £39,768 | £30,033 |
| Wales | £37,954 | £30,181 |
| Yorkshire | £37,335 | £27,173 |
Lower quartile (25th percentile) gross annual pay, full-time. Source: ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), Table 15(3).
Two things stand out. The entry band for IT professionals is remarkably flat outside London — roughly £37,000 to £44,000 almost everywhere, with London at £51,963. The geographic premium is much smaller at the bottom of the ladder than the top, where London’s top decile reaches £117,622.
And the technician column is the one to watch. It is the tier being automated first, and it sits £10,000 to £19,000 below the professional track. Historically it was the most common way into the industry without a computer science degree. That door is closing fastest.
What actually works now
Target volume, not prestige. Software Engineer had 6,140 UK permanent postings in six months; Machine Learning Engineer had 92. At the start of a career the number of doors matters more than the number on any one of them.
Go where juniors are still structurally needed. Large non-tech employers — banks, insurers, the NHS, government, logistics, retail — still run graduate schemes because their workforce planning requires them. The brand is less exciting. The scheme exists.
Treat the unglamorous roles as live options. Network Engineer pays a UK median of £57,500 and rose 4.6% last year while Software Engineer fell 12.5%. Roles nobody is making videos about have less competition per opening.
Shorten the distance to judgement. If the exposed layer is executing defined work, your aim is to get out of it quickly — own something end to end, make decisions a senior person would otherwise make, and be able to describe those decisions. Two years of that beats five years of tickets.
Know the number before you negotiate. If a first offer comes in at £26,000 in Yorkshire, the lower quartile for IT professionals there is £37,335. You may still take it. You should take it knowing where it sits.
Worth saying plainly
Most of this is not a reflection of you. The market structurally reduced the number of ways in, during the exact years you were preparing to use one. Knowing that will not get you hired, but it should stop you drawing conclusions about your own ability from a market that changed shape.
Sources
- SignalFire — State of Talent Report 2025
- The Pragmatic Engineer — The job market in 2026
- Indeed Hiring Lab — AI and job postings, July 2026
- Bloomberry — analysis of 180 million job postings, January 2023 to October 2025
- ITJobsWatch — UK permanent vacancies, six months to 15 October 2026
- ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 (provisional), Table 15(3)