Employee Benefits

The war on talent

We’ve spent 25 years talking about the 'war for talent': looking at the entry-level jobs market today though and you could be forgiven for thinking we are waging a war on it.

Saira Chambers Managing Director of Employee Benefits

Insight

17 September 2026

The first rung of the career ladder is quietly disappearing. UK entry-level vacancies fell by 32% between November 2022 and May 2025 and for the graduates chasing what remains, the competition has become nothing short of brutal.[1] Employers received an average of 140 applications per graduate vacancy last year – up 59% in a single year and the highest the Institute of Student Employers has recorded since 1991.[2] In a tight year, the junior post is the easiest to cut and the hardest to defend. “Why train someone from scratch,” the thinking goes, “when you can hire ready-made experience instead?”

In tech, where the shift has been sharpest, there are now four times as many adverts for senior programming roles as for junior ones – it’s an understandable response to a difficult market, but it’s also a slow-motion mistake.[3]

The maths always catches up

Every workforce ages, and ours is ageing faster than most. The Department for Work and Pensions is blunt about it: the UK has an ageing population and an ageing workforce.[4] The experienced people who hold so much together today will, over time, move towards retirement and many will do so within a relatively short window. When they do, they take years of hard-won knowledge with them.

In the moment, none of this feels urgent, which is precisely why it’s so easy to ignore. But it’s worth pausing on the question it raises: when those people step back, who will be ready to step forward? You cannot simply hire a manager with 15 years’ experience the day you find you need one. That person is a graduate someone chose to back 15 years earlier and supported patiently since. Talent works rather like many things you’ll one day hope to rely on – you have to pay in before you can take out. Invest in young people now and nurture them and you’re contributing to the building of the experienced, capable colleagues you will one day want to call on. Neglect that and you aren’t saving money, so much as quietly booking a talent shortage for a decade’s time.

Why this is an employee benefits issue

Here is where I would gently challenge the way we tend to frame this. Attracting and keeping young talent is too often treated as a pay question alone. Pay matters, of course, but it isn’t the whole story. When Gen Z were asked what they look for in an employer, career growth came out on top, named by 64% – edging ahead of salary and benefits.[5] When the Open University asked employers what young people are actually requesting, the answers were telling: not just flexibility and pay, but mentoring, wellbeing support and access to development.[6]

This is precisely what a well-designed benefits and reward strategy delivers. Clear development pathways and mentoring that signal a future worth staying for. Financial wellbeing support at exactly the life stage (early career, a first home, student debt) when it matters most. In addition to this, pension engagement aimed at the very people who are hardest to reach and who have the most to gain from starting early. Get this right and benefits stop being a cost of employing young people and become one of the most powerful tools you have for building the workforce you’re going to need.

Investing early is the strategy

The organisations that win over the next decade will be the ones that kept faith with early career talent, nurturing and backing young people, so that when the demographic tide turns, they have a bench of capable, loyal people ready to lead.

The war for talent was never about poaching the finished article from a competitor; it was always about nourishing the talent that is homegrown.

If you’d like to talk about how your benefits and reward strategy can help you attract, develop and keep the next generation, the Mattioli Woods Employee Benefits team would be glad to help.

Sources