Graduates aren't failing the job market. The job market is failing graduates.

Today the ONS released its latest labour market data. The headline number - 16% unemployment among under-25s - will generate plenty of commentary. Some will focus on AI reshaping entry-level work. Much of it will still focus on what graduates are doing wrong.

That framing misses the point entirely. A familiar narrative follows the current generation of graduates: that their uncertainty reflects a motivation problem, or a failure to commit.

But the public data is only part of the picture. Data from nearly 5,000 users using our platform suggests something different.

The data tells a more interesting story.

The headline statistics are striking. In the UK, 82% of graduates say they're experiencing anxiety tied to career uncertainty, with two-thirds of those who land a job regretting the first role they take. Vacancies at the UK's top 100 graduate employers have fallen by a quarter in three years - to their lowest level since 2012 - with the top 100 employers together recruiting nearly 7,000 fewer graduates last year than they did in each of the three years previously.

It's a genuinely difficult moment to be starting out. But the difficulty isn't what most people think it is.

The graduates are working, the market is not

This is not a generation of students and graduates that isn't trying. The average graduate applies to 29 different schemes. Many send over 100 applications before landing their first role. The problem isn't effort, it's options.

Research consistently shows that 50% of young people aspire to just 10 occupations - a list that has barely changed in 25 years, even as the economy has created millions of roles that didn't exist a decade ago. So graduates default to what they know. They compete for the same oversubscribed roles as everyone else, armed with CVs pointed at a very short list of familiar job titles, in a market that's producing fewer of those jobs every year.

It's hard to choose between options you don't know exist

When we match graduates to career paths based on what they tell us about themselves, 60% of suggestions resonate immediately. The average user on inicio explores 8 distinct career titles, and more than 77% end up engaging with three or more careers they hadn't previously considered.

More strikingly, 97% of the careers our users engage with are roles they almost certainly weren't considering before they opened the app. None of the traditional "top 10" aspiration jobs - doctor, lawyer, accountant, architect - appear anywhere in our 20 most-liked careers. What does appear? Content Strategist. Sustainability Consultant. UX Researcher. Environmental Consultant. CSR Manager.

Whilst these are growing sectors with real career paths and solid salaries, they have low name recognition and therefore a low search rate, especially by people who are just starting out and who don't know what to look for.

So how do we help?

If graduates are indecisive, the answer is coaching, confidence-building and helping them commit. Much of the careers support infrastructure is oriented around exactly this. But if the problem is actually that graduates are uninformed, pushing them to decide faster with less information is not the answer.

The opportunity is to give people a much richer picture of what's actually out there. When that happens, the uncertainty tends to resolve itself. Not because graduates suddenly found their confidence, but because they finally found something worth being confident about.