Your Best Graduate Hire Might Not Look Like Your Job Description

Your Best Graduate Hire Might Not Look Like Your Job Description

When an employer starts recruiting, they usually have a picture in their mind of the person they are looking for.

A particular degree. Some relevant experience. Perhaps knowledge of the industry, a few technical skills or previous exposure to a similar role.

None of those things is necessarily unreasonable. But add enough of them together and something interesting starts to happen. You stop describing what somebody needs to be capable of doing to succeed in the role, and start describing what you expect the successful candidate to look like.

There is an important difference between the two.

What if the person who could become your best graduate hire is somebody your job description is not currently attracting?

Are we recruiting the person or the capability?

Graduate recruitment is unusual because we are hiring people precisely when they are near the beginning of their careers.

They have not had ten years to build the perfect CV. They may never have worked in our industry before. They may not even know that the career we are offering exists.

What they do have is a growing collection of skills, experiences, interests, motivations and capabilities developed through university, work, volunteering, sport, societies, projects and life.

The recruitment challenge is working out which of those things are good indicators of somebody’s ability to succeed. That requires us to ask a slightly different question.

Instead of asking, what does our ideal candidate look like?

Ask, what does somebody actually need to be capable of doing to succeed here?

It sounds like a small distinction. I think it is a fundamental one.

A job description can become narrower one requirement at a time

Most employers are not deliberately trying to exclude good candidates. Quite the opposite. They are trying to reduce risk.

For some of the UK’s largest graduate employers, they are also trying to manage enormous volumes of applications.

The Institute of Student Employers reports an average of 140 applications for every graduate vacancy among its members. That number needs some context. ISE research predominantly represents larger organisations with established graduate and early career programmes, so it should not be taken as representative of every UK employer.

But it illustrates the challenge.

If you are receiving hundreds or thousands of applications, you need to get that number down to something manageable. A particular degree creates a filter. A 2:1 creates another. Previous experience, an internship, a technical skill or industry knowledge can narrow the pool further.

The faster you reduce the number, the easier the recruitment process becomes to manage. That is entirely understandable.

But there is an important question hiding inside that process:

Are those filters helping us identify the candidates most capable of succeeding in the role, or are they simply making the sift easier to manage?

There is a difference.

Individually, every requirement can be perfectly rational. Collectively, they can create a very precise picture of the person we are expecting to hire. And some of those requirements may represent one route to developing a capability, rather than the capability itself.

What are we really looking for?

Take degree subject.

There are obviously careers where specific academic or professional knowledge is genuinely essential. Medicine, engineering, certain legal roles, architecture and other regulated or highly technical professions are obvious examples.

Nobody should remove a genuinely necessary requirement simply for the sake of widening an applicant pool.

But for many graduate roles, what are we actually looking for when we specify a particular degree? Perhaps it is analytical thinking, research, numeracy, written communication, problem solving, or the ability to absorb complicated information and construct an argument.

If those are the capabilities we need, a more interesting question follows:

Could somebody have developed them somewhere we were not expecting?

A History graduate may have exceptional analytical and communication skills. A Psychology graduate may understand research, data and human behaviour. A Geography graduate may combine quantitative analysis, research and complex problem solving. A Biology graduate may have spent years learning how to interpret evidence and draw conclusions from it.

Those are valuable capabilities.

Their degree tells us something about how they developed them. It does not necessarily tell us where those capabilities could be valuable next.

It is the capability the employer needs, not necessarily the degree title through which the candidate developed it.

Graduate recruitment is partly a prediction problem

When recruiting somebody with ten years of experience, there is a substantial body of previous work to assess.

Graduate employers do not have that luxury. Nor that burden either.

A graduate is much earlier in their career journey. The employer is not simply evaluating a less experienced version of somebody who has already done the job. They are trying to understand what that person could become.

There is a simple observation most of us have heard countless times.

“What I do now has almost nothing to do with the degree I studied.”

Maybe you have said it yourself.

Someone studies History and ends up in technology. Someone studies Biology and builds a career in consulting. A Geography graduate moves into marketing. A Psychology graduate becomes a commercial leader.

None of that seems particularly surprising.

As careers develop, people layer new skills on top of what they learned at university. They learn to manage people, sell, negotiate, present, analyse, lead projects, work with customers, make commercial decisions and solve problems they were never taught about in a lecture theatre.

Ten or fifteen years later, their degree remains part of their story, but it rarely tells us everything we need to know about what they are capable of doing.

If we are perfectly comfortable accepting that somebody’s degree does not define their career at 35, why are we sometimes so determined to let it define them at 21?

That is why graduate recruitment is partly a prediction problem.

We are not simply asking what this person has already done. We are trying to understand what they could become.

Credentials still matter. Skills matter. Experience can matter. But so do aptitude, motivation, learning ability and potential.

Graduate recruitment is already changing

There is good evidence that employers have been moving in this direction.

ISE data shows a significant change in academic entry requirements over the last decade:

2:1 degree requirement: 71% in 2015/16 → 47% in 2024/25

Minimum A level grades: 26% in 2015/16 → 13% in 2024/25

No minimum entry requirements: 11% in 2015/16 → 23% in 2024/25

That is a substantial shift.

Fewer employers are relying automatically on academic thresholds, while the proportion imposing no minimum entry requirements has more than doubled.

That does not mean a 2:1 is a bad measure. For some intellectually demanding roles, employers may reasonably decide that a particular level of academic achievement is useful evidence that somebody can thrive in the work.

But a degree classification can only tell us so much.

Can this person solve problems? Can they communicate and work well with others? Can they adapt and learn quickly? Are they curious and motivated? What happens when something does not go to plan?

Most importantly, could they become outstanding at this job?

A degree classification alone cannot answer those questions.

The shift away from rigid academic entry criteria has stabilised in recent years, which may simply reflect employers finding a new balance between useful academic indicators and broader measures of capability.

But the longer term direction is compelling.

Skills, aptitude, motivation and the ability to learn increasingly matter alongside the traditional credentials used to predict them.

The candidate you never rejected

There is another consequence of an overly precise job description that is easy to overlook.

The employer may never reject the candidate because the candidate never applies.

Imagine a History graduate looking at a commercial graduate role. The advert asks for a Business or Economics degree. Commercial experience is preferred. An internship would be advantageous. Some understanding of the company’s industry would help.

They read it and think, “That is not for someone like me.”

And they move on.

But what if they are highly analytical? What if they can take complicated information, identify what matters and communicate it clearly? What if they have led a university society, worked part time throughout their degree, taught themselves new technology and demonstrated real curiosity about business?

What if they would have become outstanding in the role?

The company never rejected them. The recruitment process did its filtering before an application was ever submitted.

That is why job descriptions do not simply describe opportunities. They also send signals about who those opportunities are for.

Do not lower the bar. Define the bar better.

None of this means employers should remove meaningful requirements. Nor does it mean degrees, qualifications, technical knowledge or experience no longer matter.

The answer is not to lower the bar.

It is to define the bar better.

Before adding a requirement to a graduate job description, ask whether it is genuinely essential for somebody to succeed in the role.

If it is, keep it.

But then ask what capability you are actually trying to identify through that requirement, and whether somebody could demonstrate that capability another way.

Instead of automatically asking for previous sales experience, perhaps you need evidence of communication, confidence, resilience and motivation.

Instead of automatically specifying a particular degree, perhaps you need analytical thinking and the ability to work with data.

Instead of asking for industry experience, perhaps you need curiosity and the ability to learn quickly.

Sometimes you will arrive back at exactly the same requirement. That is fine.

The important thing is that you have chosen it deliberately.

This is not about removing standards. It is about separating the capability you need from the proxy you have traditionally used to identify it.

And perhaps there is one final test worth applying:

If we removed this requirement, would we lower the standard, or simply widen the route by which somebody could demonstrate it?

SMEs have an opportunity here

I think this is particularly interesting for smaller employers.

SMEs can look at the graduate recruitment programmes of major companies and assume they represent the model to follow. But their recruitment challenge can be completely different.

A major graduate employer might be processing thousands of applications and recruiting hundreds of people. An SME might be looking for three graduates, two graduates, or perhaps just one.

That creates an opportunity.

You do not necessarily need the same filters. You can afford to be curious about the individual. You can ask why they are interested in the role, what they have learned from experiences that do not fit neatly into conventional recruitment criteria, and where they have demonstrated capability in unexpected places.

You can ask one of the most valuable questions in graduate recruitment:

What could this person become here?

Large employers will usually have advantages in brand recognition, recruitment budgets and established graduate programmes. Smaller employers can have an advantage of their own.

Flexibility.

Use it.

From search to discovery

Last week, I wrote about how AI is beginning to move graduate recruitment from search towards discovery.

Traditional search helps us find what we already know to look for. Better technology can increasingly help employers discover relevant people they might otherwise have missed.

But there is another side to that argument.

You cannot fully discover unexpected talent if you have already defined exactly what the right candidate is supposed to look like.

Technology can broaden the search. Employer thinking has to broaden with it.

That is exactly the direction we are taking with Grace, the new AI career and recruitment product we are building at GradWorx.

For employers, Grace is being designed to do more than help recruiters search through candidates faster. We want it to help them discover a broader range of relevant graduates by looking more deeply at skills, motivations, interests, potential and fit.

We also want Grace to help employers think more carefully about the opportunity itself.

If a recruiter describes the role they are trying to fill, the technology should help them move beyond a conventional list of credentials and requirements towards a clearer understanding of the capabilities somebody actually needs to succeed.

That can then inform a stronger job description, one that is more focused on what matters and more likely to appeal to candidates who may otherwise have assumed the opportunity was not for them.

This is where I think AI becomes particularly interesting in graduate recruitment.

It should not simply make the existing process faster.

It should help us make the process better.

For employers, that means a broader and potentially stronger choice of candidates. For graduates, it means greater visibility of roles and careers they may never previously have considered.

And for both sides, it means moving beyond search towards genuine discovery.

Before you publish your next graduate job description

Look at the requirements one more time, not with the intention of removing them, but with the intention of understanding them.

Ask why each one is there. Ask what capability it is actually trying to identify. Ask whether that capability could have been developed somewhere else.

And ask whether your filters are identifying the strongest candidates, or simply making a large pile of applications smaller.

Because somewhere outside the candidate profile you have pictured may be a graduate with the aptitude, motivation and potential to become outstanding in your business.

They may have studied something different. Their experience may look different. Their CV may not contain the keywords you expected.

They may not look like your job description.

They might also be your best graduate hire.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should employers stop requiring specific degrees for graduate jobs?

Not necessarily. Some roles genuinely require specific academic knowledge, professional qualifications or technical capabilities. The more useful question is whether a particular degree is genuinely essential to success in the role, or whether it is being used as a proxy for skills that candidates could have developed through other degrees or experiences.

Does a 2:1 degree still matter to graduate employers?

Yes, for many employers it does. ISE data shows that 47% of surveyed graduate employers required a 2:1 degree in 2024/25. However, that has fallen significantly from 71% in 2015/16, while the proportion of employers with no minimum entry requirements has more than doubled from 11% to 23%.

The trend suggests employers are increasingly considering academic achievement alongside broader indicators of capability and potential.

What should employers look for when recruiting graduates?

The answer will depend on the role, but employers should consider the capabilities somebody genuinely needs to succeed. These may include analytical thinking, communication, problem solving, adaptability, motivation, curiosity, teamwork and the ability to learn.

The important distinction is between the capability required and the credential traditionally used to identify it.

Can job descriptions discourage strong graduate candidates from applying?

Yes. Job descriptions do more than describe a vacancy. They also communicate who an employer believes the opportunity is for.

A long or highly specific list of requirements can lead potentially strong candidates to conclude that they are not suitable, even where they possess many of the underlying capabilities needed to succeed.

Why can skills based graduate recruitment benefit SMEs?

SMEs often recruit far fewer graduates than major corporate employers, which can give them greater flexibility to consider candidates individually rather than relying on the same high volume filtering processes.

For an SME recruiting one or two graduates, looking beyond conventional candidate profiles can create an opportunity to discover talented people that larger or more standardised recruitment processes might overlook.

How could AI change graduate recruitment?

AI has the potential to do more than make recruitment faster. It can help employers understand the capabilities required for a role, create stronger job descriptions and discover relevant candidates whose degree, experience or background may not match the profile traditionally searched for.

At GradWorx, this broader idea of discovery is one of the principles behind Grace, our new AI career and recruitment product.

Sources

1. Institute of Student Employers, Student Recruitment Survey 2025. Used for data on graduate application volumes and changing minimum academic entry requirements, including 2:1 degrees, A level requirements and employers with no minimum entry requirements.
2. Institute of Student Employers, “5 trends you need to know from ISE’s Recruitment Survey 2025.” Additional context on record graduate application volumes, changing academic requirements and the current graduate recruitment market.
3. Institute of Student Employers, “Record graduate job applications.” Supporting evidence on application volumes and the scale of competition for graduate vacancies.
4. Institute of Student Employers, “Have graduate jobs really nose-dived?” Context on the composition of ISE employer data and its tendency to represent larger employers running structured graduate programmes.

ISE research primarily reflects its employer membership, which includes many larger organisations with established graduate and early career recruitment programmes. Figures should therefore be interpreted in that context rather than as representative of every UK employer.