Half the graduate adverts have gone. That is not the same as half the jobs.

In July there were 8,383 graduate vacancies listed on Adzuna. A year earlier there were 15,397. That is the lowest figure since Adzuna started recording it in 2016, and it sits against a peak in 2017 of more than 55,800, over six times what was on the site last month.

It is a bad number. It is also worth being careful about what it is a number of.

Adzuna counted adverts

Charlie Ball, who runs labour market intelligence at Jisc, the organisation behind Prospects, gave the BBC a second reading of the same data. His point was that employers may be advertising fewer roles specifically for graduates while the roles themselves still exist and still end up being filled by graduates. The job is there. Nobody put the word "graduate" in the advert.

He was not saying the market is fine. He said it has "not collapsed", and then immediately: "We know the graduate jobs market is weak. We know it's not in great shape."

Two things are going on and they are easy to confuse. One is employers cutting entry level headcount, which is real, and which businesses attribute to a mix of AI and the cost of employing junior staff after the rises in employer national insurance and the minimum wage. The other is a labelling change, where the same job gets posted without the tag that would have made it findable by someone searching for graduate work.

The first is a hiring problem. The second is a search problem. Only one of them is yours to do anything about.

The label was doing a lot of work

If you have applied for anything this year you have almost certainly used the word as a filter. Type "graduate" into a job site, get a list, work down it. That was a reasonable way to run a search when there were 55,800 of them.

It worked because the label carried promises. A graduate advert told you, before you read a line of it, that no experience was required, that there would be some structure to the training, that there was a start date and a process with named stages. You could prepare for it because you knew its shape.

An unlabelled role that happens to go to a graduate gives you none of that up front. It says "1-2 years' experience preferred" and leaves you to work out whether that means you. No cohort, no assessment centre date, no autumn deadline. It is a normal job that a graduate can get, and the only way to find out is to read it properly.

That is more work per role, at exactly the point where the volume approach has stopped paying. Adzuna's wider figure has 2.14 people chasing each vacancy across all levels, up from 1.93 a year ago. On the other side of the form, a growing number of employers screen with AI. Young people have been telling the BBC for a while now that they have sent hundreds of applications and heard nothing back at all.

Sending the four hundred and first is not the fix.

What this looks like in practice

A few things follow from taking Ball's reading seriously.

Search by what the job is rather than what it is called. If you want to work in marketing, search marketing roles and read the requirements, instead of searching graduate marketing schemes and taking whatever the filter returns. The scheme listings are a subset, and they are the most contested subset, because every other student is searching the same word.

Treat experience requirements as negotiable until proven otherwise. Employers write those lines aspirationally. Two years preferred is not two years required, and an employer who has quietly stopped running a graduate scheme still has junior work that somebody has to do.

Look at where the vacancies actually went up. In the same set of Adzuna figures, travel, teaching and construction posted more roles in recent weeks, while healthcare, nursing, hospitality and logistics posted fewer. None of those first three are famous for graduate schemes. All of them hire people at the start of their careers.

Then accept that this means fewer applications, done properly. If the roles are no longer pre-sorted for you, the reading is the job. You cannot skim a hundred postings for the graduate tag and fire off the same letter at all of them. You can read fifteen carefully and be right about them.

Where tiero fits

This is the market we built tiero for, so read the next paragraph with that in mind.

tiero is an application tracker with practice tools attached, aimed at the part of the process that starts once you have sent something. You paste in a job link and it reads the posting once, pulls out the closing date and the requirements and the details that would change your mind, and keeps them, so you never reopen the tab. Your applications sit on a board with their stages on it, so twenty live ones do not become a memory problem. Underneath that is the Experience Library, where your own material lives, the jobs you have had and the things that went wrong in them, so an answer sounds like you rather than like a model.

The awkward part, said plainly: on the free plan there is a cap on how many applications you can run at once, and paying raises it. Every feature is identical on both plans. We do not charge per application and we will not apply on your behalf, because the tools that do that are optimising for the number that has stopped working. In a market where each posting has to be read rather than filtered, a limit on how many you run at once is closer to a feature than a restriction. I know it does not always feel like one at 11pm in November.

The number to keep

8,383 is a count of adverts on one job site carrying a particular word. It is a real signal and it points the right way, which is down. It is not a count of the jobs a graduate can get this year.

The gap between those two figures is where most of the work now sits. It is annoying work, because the sorting that used to be done for you is now yours, but it is work you can actually do, which is more than can be said for waiting on the hiring market to turn.