Everyone is doing the same thing to find a job or work placement. That's exactly why it isn't working.

This is what I tell the students I mentor to do instead.

A final-year maths and Artificial Intelligence student called me this morning, panicked because his university careers advisor told him to spam out 200 generic LinkedIn applications.

He's looking for work experience this summer. He's in his final year so he's also starting to think about how to get a job after graduation.

His careers advisor provided the same tired advice on how to apply for a job - polish your CV, write a cover letter, create a LinkedIn account...spam out job applications by the dozens. Cross your fingers.

I stopped him there.

The numbers are against you

It's a bloodbath out there for young people.

UK employers received an average of 140 applications per graduate vacancy in 2025, more than triple the 38 applications per vacancy recorded in 2002-03. It's the highest number of applications per job ever recorded since the ISE started tracking the data in 1991.

Why has it gone vertical? Partly (mostly?) because AI tools are allowing applicants to scale applications, which means recruiters are now seeing extremely similar answers from multiple applicants. Everyone's got the same army of robots writing the same shiny cover letter. When a machine is reading your resume to see if it matches 399 other machine-written resumes, human personality is filtered out as an error.

And the doors aren't exactly wide open, either. UK graduate vacancies are at their lowest since 2012, with graduate hiring falling by 8% during the 2024-2025 recruitment cycle. If you're eyeing tech specifically, one report notes junior tech roles fell by around 46% and are projected to fall a further 53% by 2026 in certain segments. Youth unemployment for 16-24 year olds was sitting at 14.3% in early 2025.

When I ran Fundipedia, we would post a graduate role on LinkedIn. Within two days, we'd have 400 applications. Four hundred. For one job, at my small 35 person company. Now multiply that by the brand names every graduate is firing their CV at, and it's pretty clear you're a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

So if your plan is "be one of 400," you've already lost. You can't win a game where you're indistinguishable from the other 399.

When everybody else Zigs you've gotta Zag

Stop applying to vacancies. Start hunting companies. Forget the job boards. Pick 10 to 20 companies you'd be genuinely excited to work for. It doesn't matter if they are not currently advertising. You're not looking for openings — you're looking for places where you can genuinely tell a story that sets out how you will fit in and add value there.

Do your homework. Spend real time on each one. Go through their website. Look up the directors and the people running the department you wish to join. Stalk them on LinkedIn. Pick through their Companies House filings — a free government site where every UK company has to file its accounts. It'll tell you who the directors are and how the business is doing. Ten minutes per company and you'll know more about them than your competitors who are blindly scatter gunning their CVs.

Then write to them. On paper. Not an email — a physical letter. Address it to the person who actually runs the AI or data team (or whatever your field is). Nobody gets letters anymore. We all get a thousand emails and zero letters. Type it out you like, but sign it by hand, and make the cover letter reference the specific things you learned about their business. Use high quality paper.

Do not write a cover letter. Write a brief, high-conviction briefing note. A cover letter begs for a job; a briefing note identifies a business reality and offers a solution.

Your first paragraph must prove within ten seconds that you know more about their business than the 399 robots in their inbox. You do this by tying their public financial data directly to their engineering challenges.

It looks like this:

“I noticed in your recent Companies House filing that your headcount increased by 20% last year while your cash reserves held steady at £1.4m. This tells me you are scaling your data engineering capacity tightly against revenue, and likely facing a bottleneck in processing client data pipelines.”

That single sentence changes the entire dynamic. It tells the director three things: you understand commercial reality, you know how to research, and you aren't looking for a job. Instead, you are looking for an opportunity to deliver value at their company. Follow that up with two bullet points detailing how your specific skills or a personal project can help ease that specific operational pressure. Sign it and post it.

The CV behind it can be fairly generic — that's fine, you're early in your career. The CV isn't the differentiator. Sending something in the post, on good quality paper and making an effort to learn about their business in a unique way is the differentiator.

What you're trying to do is make one human being pick up your letter and think: this person actually wants to work here. They've done the work. They're not spraying and praying. That's it. That's the whole game. Be memorable for the right reasons.

You should also get physical. Where do the people at these companies hang out? Is there a conference they go to? A pub next to the office? I'm not joking. In a landscape this competitive, building a real, physical connection where the person you want to work for can eyeball you beats a thousand cold emails every time.

Line up your story before you fire a shot

You're probably thinking harder about what you're going to make than who you're going to make it for. Almost everyone does — it's the most common mistake there is. You obsess over the supply of your idea and forget to check whether there's any demand for it.

So make everything point in the same direction. If you're building a personal project, build one that supports the narrative you'll tell an employer in your cover letter. For example, my student wants to build an AI tool to help his university tutors handle student questions between classes more efficiently. Brilliant. Now let's look at the story that tells: I'm studying AI, I'm applying it to a real problem in front of me, and I want to bring that same thinking to your business.

That's a person who looks different and it presents a story arc that is almost impossible to ignore.

The market is tough, not closed

The numbers are dark, it's a war out there. But don't let them paralyse you, either.

Over a third of employers actually increased their hiring over the last year, and graduate roles were filled at a 97% success rate. The jobs exist. The question is whether you'll be one of the 400 in the queue, or the one person who showed up differently.

Everybody else is going to zig. They'll quick-apply, copy-paste, and pray and moan that they've fired off 200 applications and not heard back.

You're going to zag. And you're going to stand and get further ahead for it.