The traditional first job — the broad graduate scheme at a large employer that trained you for two years and then decided what you were — has narrowed. Intakes have shrunk, some have been cut entirely, and the general "graduate analyst" tier that absorbed people with no specific skills is thinner than it was.
This is not a reason to apply to more of them. It is a reason to look at where hiring with no experience still happens, because those places have not gone away. They are just less visible: no campus milkround, no advertising on the platforms aimed at you.
Where graduates are still hired
Smaller employers
Organisations of roughly ten to two hundred people hire constantly and advertise badly. They have no graduate programme; they have a job that needs doing, and a person who learns fast and costs less is a reasonable answer.
The trade is real: less structured training, a less recognisable name, more of your own judgement required. The gain is that you touch far more of the business in year one, and end with concrete accomplishments rather than rotations.
Find them by sector and location rather than by job board: company sites, local business press, industry association member lists, and direct messages to the person who would manage you. Expect to make the first move.
Regulated sectors with mandated training routes
Some professions cannot legally staff themselves without training new entrants, so the entry route survives regardless of the hiring climate. Accounting and audit, law, actuarial work, chartered engineering, nursing and allied health, teaching, surveying, and much of the public sector.
These roles are structured, have known entry points, and recruit to a calendar. The commitment is longer and early pay is often below what a commercial role would offer, with the compensation arriving as a qualification that is portable and hard to fake. Which professions work this way, and the route through them, is market-specific — check the rules where you intend to work.
Support functions inside growing organisations
Where an organisation is expanding, it hires at the edges before the middle: customer support, operations coordination, sales development, compliance administration, recruitment coordination.
These are genuinely entry-level and sit next to the function you probably want. An operations coordinator who is good at the job is the obvious internal candidate for the analyst role a year later, and internal moves are far easier. Take the door that is open, at a company that is growing.
Contract, temporary and fixed-term work
An employer takes less risk on a six-month contract, which is why it is reachable. Six months of real work removes the hardest barrier you face: nobody has paid you to do anything yet.
Where to spend your applications
Roughly half your effort on smaller employers you find and contact directly, a quarter on structured programmes in regulated professions, and a quarter on support roles inside organisations that are visibly growing. Large open graduate schemes deserve one batched session a week, not your afternoons.
What a graduate CV should carry
One page. The reader spends under a minute on it, and its entire job is to answer "can this person do useful work" when there is no employment history to prove it.
In this order:
- Three lines at the top naming what you are looking for and the two most relevant things about you. Not a statement about being passionate and hardworking — every CV says that, so it says nothing.
- Evidence of doing something, ahead of education. A dissertation with a real question and a method, a substantial project, a society you ran, freelance or voluntary work, a portfolio. Describe it like a job: what the problem was, what you did, what the result was, with a number where one exists.
- Any paid work at all, including hospitality, retail, warehouse and care work. These are not filler. They prove attendance, handling difficult people, and working a shift you did not feel like.
- Education, with the grade, the institution, and two or three directly relevant modules. Not the full transcript.
- Tools and languages, named specifically and honestly. "Intermediate Excel — pivot tables, lookups, basic macros" is worth more than eleven logos.
Two rules throughout. Every bullet starts with a verb and contains an outcome. Nothing goes on the page that you could not talk about for two minutes under questioning.
The graduate CV that works is not the one that sounds most impressive. It is the one where every line gives the reader something concrete to ask about.
Volume or targeting
The standard advice — ten good applications beat a hundred rushed ones — holds, with one adjustment for this stage. You have less network and less evidence, so a purely targeted approach has fewer places to aim.
Split it. Batch the applications with real deadlines — structured schemes, public sector intakes, anything with a fixed closing date — into one session a week. Those processes are genuinely standardised and a tailored covering letter changes little.
Spend the rest of the week on targeting, which at this stage means the small employers nobody else is writing to. Find the person who would manage you, send four sentences, name one specific thing about what they do, and attach the work you are proudest of. Response rates to that are many times what a portal returns, because so few people do it.
Cap the whole thing at twelve to fifteen hours a week and track it on one sheet. A first search commonly runs three to six months, longer in a weak market, and what runs out first is not opportunities but your willingness to keep going.