I’m standing in a crowd at Westfield Stratford City and I can’t move. Around me, visitors to the London Job Fair, brand name handbags, jostling to get to the stalls of businesses hoping to hire them. They bend and twist to catch recruiters’ eyes as if trying to get a drink in a crowded bar. On the other side of the fair, which consists of a plastic corridor on the second floor of the mall, about 40 people wait for a conversation to begin. One screen displays a slide titled: “Why Nobody’s Responding to Your Job Applications.” The speaker who will give the presentation has not appeared. “I’m sorry, we’re still waiting for them,” says a staff member into a microphone.
The number of people looking for permanent work rose last month as permanent employment continued to decline. Unemployment in the UK is at its highest level since 2021, or since 2015 for those aged 16-24. The process of finding a job has become increasingly elusive, as hopeful graduates facing an average of £50,000 in student debt have been whittled down by AI-determined keywords and mysterious algorithms. The air at the London Job Fair is murky with desperation, though it could be the asphyxiating smell of Lush from a few shops down. However, employment is ultimately controlled by people. Fair visitors are here to track down people who read their CV and stamp it as bad or good. They are here to meet recruiters.
“I feel like Gandalf,” says Nick Gordon, who is 50 and has worked in the recruitment industry since he was 23. “I’ve been through many different economic problems, but recruitment companies have always survived.” At the end of the pandemic, business was booming: hiring hit record levels month after month, and companies were willing to pay inflated wages (and give recruiters huge commissions) to attract candidates who had become hard to find in the past two years. In July 2022, there were a record 1.85 million active job adverts in the UK.
In 2026, you might think that recruiters occupy an even more powerful position. As job vacancies dwindle and applications pile up, these LinkedIn leviathans can supposedly weed out an overqualified candidate from the thousands of resumes paraded before them. But in reality, even the people who do the hiring can’t be hired.
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Employment has fallen below pre-pandemic levels. Many young people no longer have the luxury of choosing between careers: at the fair today, the queue for the Royal Air Force stall has joined that of its neighbour, luxury beauty retailer Space NK. A group of 19-year-olds are working on a poster asking if they’ve ever thought about looking after a child. Between November 2019 and January 2020, there were 810,000 job vacancies in the UK; there were 726,000 between November 2025 and January 2026. This is thought to be due to a dizzying cocktail of geopolitical shocks making companies worry about the future, coupled with the cost to employers of increasing the minimum wage and National Insurance contributions. And when businesses aren’t looking to recruit, they don’t need recruiters. “Right now, we can find people, but we can’t find customers,” Gordon says. “Right now, it’s incredible the volume of (recruiting companies) that just can’t afford to keep up.” SThree, a global recruitment firm for Stem-based roles, cut its staff by 18 per cent last year as their rates fell in the UK. In 2025, Challenge Recruitment Group – which counted Tesco and Amazon as clients – was rescued from receivership by a US firm and owes £90m in unpaid tax to HMRC. Gordon is no longer a recruiter; he now invests in recruitment companies at risk of bankruptcy.
Many people applying for a job aren’t interacting with recruiters or employers, despite their best efforts. A job fair talk promises to help you create a “future-ready CV” to combat the “AI-driven job market” (unless you’re convinced of a different path from the previous lecture: for anyone who’s “dreamed of becoming a social influencer”). Dan Hawes, who founded the Graduate Recruitment Bureau in 1997, says young job applicants are fed up with how impersonal the process has become, as chatbots and one-way AI interviews have replaced communication between the company and the candidate. “They just want to talk to a human. But on the other hand, for employers to deal with those rejections at scale is a huge task.” Job applications from graduates have doubled since 2023. Last year, 60,000 people applied for 2,000 entry-level positions at accountancy firm PWC, a 35 per cent increase on the previous year. Many of these applications will be remarkably similar. “It’s a real problem at the moment because it’s so easy to apply for jobs and some graduates are using AI to produce CVs quickly. But for employers, they find they’re getting a lot of CVs that look the same,” says Hawes. “At first they think, ‘Wow, we have thousands of applications.’ But then they water it down and it’s not what they’re looking for at all.”
When British recruitment company Freshminds surveyed graduates applying to investment banks late last year, two-thirds said they had used AI during the application process, whether it was writing cover letters or talking to ChatGPT for interview practice. Employers now use recruiters to weed out these AI-generated applications. Although some firms, like Freshminds, have recruiters do this task manually, more often the job of figuring out which applications are AI-assisted is handed over to, well, AI.
Saadiya, 23, works seasonally as an exam proctor but has been looking for a full-time job since the summer of 2024. She holds a desk in one hand and a job fair flyer in the other; she is trying to visit every stall and half are crossed. Saadiya has started coming to job fairs to talk to people face-to-face, after the 30 applications she sent in a week were mostly met with silence. She says she never uses AI to write her cover letters, but her applications are still sometimes flagged as AI-generated. She thinks it’s because she’s trying to adapt them to meet the demands of AI recruiting systems. “Candidates and clients are both trying AI, and then just passing each other,” says Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation. Beleaguered recruiters are increasingly turning to AI to deal with an onslaught of applications, and jaded job hunters feel they must do the same to beat these systems.
Before the interview stage, AI sorts CVs and cover letters, giving priority to those that contain certain keywords that complement the job description. “Obviously, reviewing CVs can be problematic for diversity initiatives,” says Edith Carmichael, a recruiter at Freshminds. “What do you train AI to filter? Is it university? Is it clubs, societies? It all comes with little problems.” In 2018, Amazon removed its AI recruiting tool after it showed a preference for male candidates. It gets worse at the interview stage. An AI interviewer can’t shake an applicant’s hand, but it can gauge how empathetic they are, gauge facial expressions, and the time it takes to answer questions. Spark Hire, a popular one-way video hiring software, summarizes candidates’ interview responses and scores them based on traits such as communication, enthusiasm and motivation. There is no need for a real person to interview them. Instead, candidates speak to a one-sided mirror in hopes of eventually conjuring up a real person—a sort of corporate Bloody Mary.
What candidates want to know most from recruiters, what they always ask, is how to “stand out”. The phrase recurs in my conversations with both recruiters and job seekers. Get someone to proofread your resume, Hawes says, or contact someone at the company you’re applying to. If good spelling and a polite email fail (I think people who send out 30 applications a week for more than a year might have tried this), Hawes has another suggestion: “See if there’s a regular person you’ve connected with, maybe. It certainly helps if they’ve maybe gone to your university; that alumni connection can be quite powerful. Just to get noticed.” It’s not everyone’s definition of inclusion.
The journey to a career in 2026 is not unlike this job fair: a jam-packed, circling maze. The notion of a dream job is evaporating. Young people will dream about any job they can have. This week, the government will begin investigating how students have embraced the privilege of an education that no longer guarantees them employment opportunities. There is a lot of talk about “broken promises”. But we have entered a landscape where young people are no longer promised anything – not even a rejection letter. Any ambition should be couched in a caveat: “I know there are so many people applying” or “I know I won’t make it.” And no one disagrees. One wonders what it will look like when – if – the exhausted people at this job fair finally get to work, having been forced to compromise and contort so much to do so. What social contract are they signing? The opportunity to work and be compensated for it has become a luxury and increasingly rare.
As I’m about to leave the job fair, I approach two girls for a final interview. They are both 17 years old, the youngest people I have ever spoken to, and are visiting their college. They’ve found it “hot and crowded,” they tell me, and quite overwhelming. They are not applying for jobs yet. Still, “I think there’s a lot of opportunity there, if you really look at it,” says one of them. How do they feel about the start? “Excited,” they say. I hope this feeling lasts.
(Further reading: Young people cannot find work. Does work care?)
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