The bottom rung of the ladder is thinning out fast. Adzuna has seen a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT's launch, with graduates facing the toughest job market since 2018 techUK – What's actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?. The pattern is sharpest in tech itself: the UK tech sector cut graduate jobs by 46% in the past year, with a further 53% drop projected, according to figures from the Institute of Student Employers The Register.
It isn't only juniors feeling it. In engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a nine-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK. That gap tells the story of this moment. The tasks that used to train new people, running the routine checks, are now the first thing automated. So the demand that remains clusters around people who can weigh what the automation surfaces.
Diagnostics used to be the job. An agent now runs the first pass in seconds, logs the anomalies and ranks them. What it can't do reliably is decide which fault is real, which is noise, and which one you stop the line for. That decision, fault judgement, becomes the hire.
The market is already paying for that judgement. Demand for AI skills increased nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK The Register (Accenture data). At the same time, the way people enter these roles is shifting: apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. Employers are building judgement on the job, not just buying it ready-made.
Start by rewriting the job. If an agent does the diagnostic pass, your advert shouldn't ask for people who run diagnostics. It should ask for people who interpret them: who can read a ranked list of faults, challenge the ranking, and explain the call they'd make.
The aim is simple. You want the person who makes the agent's output worth trusting, because they know when to override it.
Finding people who can judge faults, not just run checks, means reading past the keywords on a CV. That's where we help. We search a database of 15 million people, surface a ranked shortlist in seconds, and manage your recruitment end to end so you can focus on testing the judgement that matters. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell Reed.ai the role, and we'll start the search today.
