For candidates →End-to-end programme management
Single programme dashboard across attraction, assessment, interview, offer, onboarding and retention. Scheme-leadership view that rolls up the operational metrics they actually have to defend.
Solutions · Hire
Your graduate scheme that worked in 2019 isn’t working in 2026.
Application volume is up. Cost-per-hire is up. Twenty-four-month retention is down. The mechanics that worked when graduate hiring was driven by target-university milkrounds and SHL aptitude tests don’t hold against AI-prepped applications, AI-flattened case interviews and a candidate market with parallel-offer expectations. Graduate & Intern Recruitment is the end-to-end solution that rebuilds the scheme around what actually predicts performance — while bringing the cost-per-hire back down.
The graduate-scheme math
Highest cost-per-hire, lowest retention — and you can’t see which fix matters most.
Graduate hiring is the highest-cost-per-hire and lowest-retention pipeline most early-careers teams run. £18,000 to £25,000 per hire all-in (assessment, marketing, brand, team time). 24-month retention around 60%. That means roughly 40% of your most expensive hires aren’t there at month 24, and you’re back in the market with the same problem.
Even small improvements in either number compound. A 10pp retention lift on a 200-graduate scheme is worth roughly £400k in avoided replacement cost; a 1.6× performance uplift on the surviving cohort is worth more, in some businesses substantially more.
Applications per role
1,200+
Average for finance and consulting graduate roles. Tech around 200–400; engineering similar.
24-month retention (industry)
60%
UK graduate-scheme 24-month retention benchmark across major-employer cohorts.
TTP cohorts
78%
24-month retention on TTP-deployed graduate cohorts. +18pp vs benchmark.
Cost-per-hire
£18–25k
All-in cost per graduate hire (assessment, marketing, brand, team time, onboarding) at major UK employers.
If you don't fix this
You hire more to compensate — and the unit economics get worse.
When the 24-month retention number drops, the operational response is usually to hire more to compensate. That makes the cost-per-hire problem worse: more inbound, more screening time, more brand spend, and the underlying performance and retention numbers don’t move because the assessment process driving them hasn’t changed. Within two cycles you’re running a bigger version of the same scheme that wasn’t working last year, just costlier.
A bigger graduate scheme isn’t a better graduate scheme.
Graduate & Intern Recruitment is the end-to-end programme-management solution — designed around the operational outcome (performance + retention), not just the input (cohort fill). Behavioural-evidence assessment from IWX feeds the Assessment Platform; structured video interviews on TalentScreen; programme-management on TalentHub; first-90-days onboarding integrated; 24-month retention tracking back-fed into selection model calibration. The internship pipeline is integrated with the graduate scheme — converted interns are the most-retained cohort segment for most employers and we manage that conversion explicitly.
How we deliver this
Six things that make a graduate scheme work in 2026.
Designed against the metric most graduate-scheme leads actually have to defend at year-end — a combination of cost-per-hire, first-year performance and 24-month retention. Not just “cohort fill”.
Featured · FTSE 100 investment bank
Case study · 2025 graduate finance cohort
1.6× performance, +22pp diversity, retention up.
A UK-headquartered investment bank moved their graduate finance scheme to TTP’s end-to-end Graduate Recruitment in 2024. After two intake cycles, first-year line-manager performance ratings beat prior cohorts by 1.6×. Diversity within the hired cohort rose 22 percentage points without any change to the role profile or selection bar. 24-month retention — the most expensive metric in their early-careers spend — climbed from 58% to 76%. The aggregate impact on cost-per-retained-hire was substantial.
1.6×
Performance
+22pp
Diversity
+18pp
Retention 24mo
What this connects to
Every solution, in one programme.
Graduate & Intern Recruitment is the most multi-product solution we run. It draws on Schools Engagement and Immersive Work Experience upstream (where the pipeline starts), Candidate Attraction & Engagement (where they enter the funnel), Application Management and the Assessment Platform (selection), Video Interviews (panel), Identity Verification (RTW) and Onboarding (first 90 days through to year-end review).
Most clients deploy this as a multi-year programme rather than a single-cycle engagement. The retention and performance outcomes only show up cleanly at 24 months.
Platform
TalentHub
Programme-management hub. Single dashboard across attraction, selection, retention.
Pairs with
Assessment Platform
Behavioural-evidence assessment that drives the performance and retention uplift.
Downstream
Onboarding
The first-90-days programme that turns offer-acceptance into 24-month retention.
Service tier
Recruitment Outsourcing
If you want us to run the whole scheme end-to-end.
Graduate & intern programmes at
FTSE 100 bank
PwC
Microsoft
John Lewis
Schneider Electric
Channel 4
Costa
TfL
Talk to the graduate-scheme team
Got a graduate scheme built for 2019?
Most clients start with a 60-minute scheme audit: we plug your last three cohorts’ data (anonymised) into our cost-per-retained-hire model, walk through where the leakage is, and tell you which of cost-per-hire, performance, or retention is most fixable for your scheme. Walk away with a numbered list and a sense of which intervention pays for itself first.