The Early Bird Catches The Worm – Why Applying Early Matters for Social Mobility

By Dr Claire Tyler, Professor Lindsey Macmillan, and Dr Catherine Dilnot

Last Thursday we released our Nuffield-funded ‘Inequalities in Access to Professional Occupations’ report, and an accompanying blog post showing that working class students are well represented in application pools for professional graduate roles but are 32% less likely to receive job offers than applicants from professional backgrounds.

On Friday, our blog post revealed that date of application accounts for 11% of the gap in offer rates between applicants from working class and professional backgrounds in the accounting and professional services sector. This means that even if an applicant from a working class background obtained the same A-level grades, attended a similar university and studied the same undergraduate subject (also with the same gender, ethnicity, UK region of origin and office location and applied to the same employer), they are still less likely to obtain a job offer because they are more likely to apply later.

Our findings suggest that employers who can reduce or remove the delay in applications from working class applicants, will likely see an improvement in the offer rates to working class applicants to their graduate schemes. We therefore argue that improving the ‘application readiness’ of working class applicants may be low hanging fruit amongst the many challenges which exist in improving social mobility into professional careers.

Even applying a few weeks earlier can make a difference to a candidate’s chance of obtaining a job offer. We found that applying one month earlier is associated with around a 6% increased chance of obtaining a job offer (0.4ppt benefit per month, mean offer rate 6.3ppt), even among otherwise similar candidates.

Closing windows

Highlighting the importance of application readiness for working class applicants is particularly timely as data from the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) Recruitment Surveys 2021 to 2024 shows that recruitment windows have been narrowing over recent years. In the last year of available data from the 2023/2024 recruitment cycle collected in July 2024, 38% of employers closed graduate recruitment between October to December (2023), compared to 24% the previous year and 14% in the year before that (Figure 1). In our own data from employers, we show that by the start of an undergraduate’s final year of study (early October), the accountancy firms in our sample have already received 30% of applications and made 50% of job offers for graduate schemes starting the following September.

Figure 1: Recruitment campaign closing date trends

The ISE suggest the decision of graduate employers to close earlier this year may have been a response to being overwhelmed by the recent 59% increase in graduate job applications and the record high ratio of applications to vacancies (140:1), the highest recorded in over 30 years. It is likely this huge increase in application volumes is due to the increasing use of AI by applicants and the ongoing removal of academic attainment criteria . Our findings suggest that if this early closure trend continues it risks further disadvantaging lower SEB candidates.

The work experience ‘treadmill’

Initial feedback from discussing our findings with universities and employers highlighted that lower SEB candidates may apply later to graduate schemes for many reasons including less awareness of application deadlines; being unaware that employers may close recruitment early; less confidence in their application so they may take longer to prepare; and being more likely to be balancing competing priorities of study and graduate job applications with part time employment.

This issue of ‘application readiness’ is also far from confined to graduate scheme applications. Internships, undertaken a year earlier, also face a similar issue as undergraduates must be ready during their second year of university to apply to these programmes. Figure 2 shows that state school applicants ‘under’ apply to internships, whereas private school applicants ‘over’ apply, relative to the graduate talent pool. In other words, applicants to internship routes from independent schools are hugely overrepresented relative to the proportion of graduates from our national benchmarks attending these types of schools, with double the proportion applying to internship routes (27% compared to 13% nationally). State school applicants are therefore underrepresented in applicant pools for internships, but crucially when they do apply, they perform equally as well as independent school students during the recruitment process (Figure 3). So the key here is encouraging undergraduates from state school to be ready to apply for internships during their penultimate year at university – and as early as possible within that year.

Figure 2 : Proportion of interns at various stages of the recruitment process, by school type

Figure 3: Offer rates to internship programmes, conditional on observable differences across applicants, by school type

 

Given the drive for employers to lock in talented undergraduates early, awareness of application deadlines and requirements can also be important for students as early as first year where undergraduates scramble to apply for spring internship opportunities as soon as they enrol in first term. The ‘treadmill’ of work experience schemes is therefore starting earlier in an undergraduate’s journey, with high conversion rates to competitive graduate jobs for the lucky few. As one young person told us this week, “having the right information makes it easier to be lucky”.

Recommendations

To improve the ‘application readiness’ of underrepresented applicants we therefore recommend:

• Employers clearly communicate planned recruitment windows and emphasise to university careers teams and students that you may close early if vacancies are filled or if you’re managing the pipeline due to a high volume of applications.
• University careers teams reach students early (in first or early second year) and where possible embed awareness of recruitment demands into the curriculum as early as possible. For undergraduates from underrepresented groups to be successful they need to know the ‘rules of the game’ they’re playing.
• Universities make clear to disadvantaged students that applying early to graduate and internship schemes is likely to improve their chances of success.
• Employers and university careers teams collaborate to build the confidence of underrepresented groups to apply earlier, factoring in the competing demands these students may be juggling. This includes providing guidance on testing requirements and practice tests. This has the double benefit of giving students who might not have a support network familiar with recruitment processes the chance to overcome a lack of confidence with testing through repeated practice and increasing the chance of their making early applications to graduate schemes.
• Employers consider opening spring week schemes to undergraduate students from all years and internships to finalists (as well as penultimate year students) to enable talented students from underrepresented groups a better chance of participating in these schemes.
• Employers expand outreach efforts to attract state-educated applicants to internships, given their high conversion to graduate roles.