What Hiring Managers Expect From 2026 Graduates

Hiring managers' complaints about graduates are rarely about code. A survey of a thousand of them shows where the bar has moved, and how to clear it.

If you are about to graduate and start looking for work, the most useful thing to know is that employers are still hiring, and what they screen for has changed. AI now does much of the routine work that entry-level hires used to be given, so the concerns that keep graduates out are rarely about code or credentials. They are about whether you can understand the work in front of you and whether you can be trusted to carry it. That is the new bar, and it is one you can train for.

What changed

The clearest picture of the shift comes from a ResumeTemplates survey of 1,000 US hiring managers, all at companies with more than a hundred employees. The findings suggest that employers are still hiring graduates, but the expectations around entry-level roles are changing. 65 percent of hiring managers say they plan to hire this year's graduates at the same volume as last year or higher. At the same time, 55 percent say AI has already influenced how they allocate their entry-level hiring budgets.

That shift is changing the kind of work graduates are likely to encounter when they enter the workplace. AI is increasingly taking on routine tasks such as drafting, formatting, and first-pass analysis, while companies are placing greater value on the skills that help people understand, evaluate and take ownership of the work. In fact, 45 percent of companies surveyed say they have restructured roles so that one senior employee working with AI now covers work that previously involved several entry-level hires.

The opportunity for graduates, then, is not to compete with AI at producing routine output. It is to become the kind of professional who can use these tools effectively while bringing the judgement, communication, and problem-solving skills they cannot replace.

What employers say is missing

Employers are not complaining that graduates cannot code, or that their degrees taught the wrong framework. The concerns they describe run deeper and simpler: whether you can read something messy and understand what it is asking, whether you can write something a client could see, and whether you can eventually be left alone with a decision. The numbers make the point plainly:

1. 76 percent say recent graduates need help reading routine work documents, the memos, contracts and budgets that ordinary jobs run on.
2. 41 percent say graduates cannot write a professional email.
3. 40 percent say graduates struggle to analyse or interpret data.
4. Only 17 percent fully trust a recent graduate to represent the company in front of a customer. Everyone else limits new hires to routine or supervised interactions.

This is precisely what you would expect in a market where AI produces routine output cheaply. Generating work has stopped being scarce. What remains scarce is understanding it well enough to judge it, and being the kind of person an employer will trust with it. That is where the bar now sits.

What to do about it

• First, treat reading as a skill and practise it deliberately. When you are given a brief, a spec or a document, your value is not in how fast you respond to it. It is in whether you understood it, and the clearest evidence of understanding is the quality of your questions. The applicant who reads a messy brief and comes back with the one question that exposes its gap has just demonstrated the exact ability three quarters of hiring managers say graduates lack.
• Second, write like it matters, because it now does. A professional email is a small thing until 41 percent of hiring managers say graduates cannot produce one. Write real emails, get someone experienced to review them, and learn the difference between writing that fills space and writing that moves a decision along.
• Third, work with data until interpreting it feels normal. You do not need to be a statistician. You need to be able to look at a set of numbers and say what they mean and what they do not, which is a practised skill, and one that 40 percent of your competition has not practised.
• Fourth, earn trust visibly and early. The survey's most sobering number is that trust ceiling: only 17 percent of managers fully trust a new graduate with customers or independent decisions. Trust is built the unglamorous way: you do what you said you would do, you flag problems before anyone else finds them, and you own small things completely before asking for bigger ones. In your applications, this means naming exactly what you owned in any project you mention, because a line like our team built this tells a reviewer nothing about you. And weight your experience honestly: 61 percent of hiring managers will consider a graduate with no internship only for certain roles, or not at all. If an internship has not been possible, the report's own advice is that other real experience still counts when you frame it by what you did, so a project you owned or a responsibility you carried belongs on your application described in exactly those terms.

A bar you can train for

The bar has moved from producing work to understanding it, and that is a bar you can train for. It is also, honestly, why our training programmes spend as much time on reading real briefs and owning real deliverables as they do on the technical curriculum. The graduates who get hired in this market are the ones who can be trusted with the parts of the job AI cannot do, and those parts can be learned. The survey is a description of the gap. It is also, if you read it the right way, a set of instructions.