If you’ve been sending off job applications and hearing nothing back, you’re not imagining it. The competition for entry-level work in Britain has got significantly fiercer, and one of the country’s biggest retailers is sounding the alarm.
Lord Wolfson, chief executive of Next, told the BBC that the fashion giant now receives roughly twice as many applicants for a single role as it did just two years ago. That’s not a modest uptick. That’s a doubling of the queue at the door.
Wolfson described the shift in entry-level employment as “dramatic,” and given Next’s scale across hundreds of UK stores, his view carries real weight. This isn’t a small business struggling to find its feet; it’s one of the most closely watched retailers on the high street.
So what’s driving it? The chancellor’s decision to raise employer National Insurance contributions has made hiring cheaper workers considerably more expensive for businesses. Many employers are simply taking on fewer people, holding vacancies open longer, or replacing multiple part-time roles with one full-time position.
“The number of applicants we get per vacancy has doubled in the last two years,” Wolfson said, painting a picture of a labour market where jobseekers are chasing a shrinking pool of opportunities.
For young people in particular, this is a troubling development. Entry-level jobs are the foot in the door, the first line on the CV, the experience that makes the next application slightly less daunting. Fewer of those roles means a harder climb from the very first rung.
It’s not all doom, mind you. Next itself remains profitable, and Wolfson is no doom-monger by nature. But his warning aligns with broader data showing that UK job vacancies have been falling steadily from their post-pandemic peak.
The Office for National Statistics recorded vacancies dropping for the tenth consecutive quarter earlier this year, a streak that tells its own story about employer confidence and cost pressures biting hard.
The big question now is whether this is a temporary squeeze as businesses absorb the tax changes, or the beginning of a longer structural shift in how companies think about their entry-level workforce.
