A business analyst role advertised recently attracted over 2,000 applications. One job. Two thousand people.
A business analyst role advertised recently attracted over 2,000 applications. One job. Two thousand people. The Irish Times reported the figure almost in passing, but it is worth sitting with for a moment, because it tells you something real about what the graduate job market has become.
This is not an anomaly. Across the UK, the average employer now receives 140 applications per graduate vacancy, the highest number recorded in over three decades. In finance and professional services, that figure climbs to 188 applications per role. And that was before AI made applying even easier. The pile is only getting bigger.
What changed is LinkedIn, and the broader digitisation of hiring, which removed almost every barrier to applying for a job. No envelope, no stamp, no office to walk into. Just a profile, a click, and a cover letter generated in thirty seconds. As one industry body put it, as AI makes it easier to apply for jobs, volumes are pushed up and quality goes down, creating more rejections. The system is feeding itself into irrelevance.
The consequences for graduates are real. Just 30 percent of 2025 graduates have secured full-time jobs related to their degree, down from 41 percent the year before. The Class of 2025 submitted more applications on average than their 2024 counterparts, yet received fewer job offers. More effort, worse outcomes. That is the loop most graduates are stuck in right now.
For Irish graduates specifically, the situation has its own edge. The domestic market is small. The sectors that pay well, finance, tech, consulting, are largely concentrated in Dublin, and competition for those positions is now effectively international. A graduate in Cork is up
against candidates from Warsaw, Lisbon, and Kuala Lumpur applying for the same hybrid role and perfectly willing to relocate. The pile is not just big. It is global.
None of this means the market is impossible. But it does mean that the strategy most graduates are running, polish the CV, upload to LinkedIn, apply to forty roles, wait, is producing diminishing returns. The 2,000 application figure should be clarifying. If your plan is to be the one successful application in two thousand, you need a concrete reason why. Hoping to stand out in a pile that size is not a strategy. It is a lottery.
What separates candidates at that volume is not always qualifications. Plenty of those 2,000 were qualified. What separates them is visibility, connection, and whether someone in that building already knows their name. Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth that no careers advisor says plainly: most of the people winning this market are not winning through the system. They are winning around it.
The Statistic Nobody Is Acting On
LinkedIn’s own data shows that applicants are significantly more likely to be hired when they have a connection inside the organisation they are applying to. Not a formal reference. Not an introduction through a portal. Just a person who knows them, who can say their name in a room when the role comes up. That is it. That is the edge. And most graduates are not pursuing it.
The reason is not laziness exactly. It is a kind of learned helplessness the digital application process has quietly encouraged. Apply online, upload your documents, wait for a response. The system presents itself as the correct route, so people follow it, firing thirty applications into the void and wondering why the silence is so complete.
“What they have stopped doing is talking to people”
Networking carries a social weight that job applications do not. Sending a cold email to someone you admire feels presumptuous in a way that clicking apply never does. There is a vulnerability in asking for someone’s time, in being honest that you are trying to get somewhere and you need some help getting there. Rejection from a portal is abstract. Rejection from an actual person stings.
But here is what nobody tells you until it is almost too late: most people are far more willing to help than you expect. The alumni network, the speakers at your careers event, the journalist whose work you follow, the manager whose post you agreed with on LinkedIn. These are not gatekeepers. They are people who were once exactly where you are, and who will usually give you twenty minutes if you ask properly.
What the Application System Actually Rewards
The digitisation of hiring was supposed to open things up. In some ways it did. A student in Galway can apply to a London firm without getting on a plane. But the unintended consequence is a system so flooded with volume that quality has become almost impossible to assess at the screening stage.
More than half of executives surveyed this year reported that AI adoption has already reduced entry-level positions at their organisations. Fewer roles, more applicants, and the ones doing the screening are often algorithms looking for keywords rather than humans looking for potential.
The graduates who understand this are not trying to beat the algorithm. They are bypassing it. They are getting to the person doing the hiring before the job is posted, or at minimum before the pile becomes unmanageable. They are being recommended rather than
discovered. And that does not come from a better CV. It comes from a relationship built before anyone needed anything.
Nobody Is Coming to Do This For You
The ask does not need to be complicated. A short, specific email explaining who you are, why you are reaching out to this person in particular, and what you are hoping to learn. Not asking for a job. Asking for a conversation. That distinction matters because it lowers the stakes for both sides and, more often than not, leads somewhere useful.
What you are building when you do this is not a contact list. It is a reputation. People remember the students who showed initiative before they needed anything. They forget immediately the application that came through the portal with everyone else’s. The graduates navigating this market well are not smarter or better qualified than their peers. They are just operating differently. Going to the events. Following up after them. Treating every conversation as a thread worth pulling. Doing the uncomfortable thing often enough that it stops feeling uncomfortable.
The irony is this approach is not harder than mass applying. It is more targeted, more human, and in most cases more efficient. One good conversation with someone inside a company will tell you more about whether you want to work there than any job description ever will.
The 2,000 application pile is not going anywhere. If anything it is going to grow. Job postings on Handshake declined 15 percent over the past year, while the number of applications per job increased by 30 percent. The students who figure out early that this game is about people rather than portals are the ones who spend less time waiting and more time actually getting somewhere.
So go to the event. Send the email. Follow up after the coffee. Not because it always works, and not because it is comfortable. Because the alternative is joining a queue of two thousand people and hoping to get lucky.
The odds on that are not good.