A degree from one of France’s grandes écoles (the selective engineering and business schools that feed the country’s corporate and public elite) used to be close to a guarantee of a quick first job. That guarantee is wearing thin. According to the Conférence des grandes écoles, a quarter of 2025 graduates were still not in employment six months after leaving school.

The reaction among young graduates is telling. Asked what they want from an employer, they now put job security and employer reputation noticeably higher than a year ago, while purpose and social commitments slip down the list. As Le Monde reported this week, the companies best placed to benefit are France’s defence and aerospace groups, led by Airbus, Safran and Thales.

This piece is for both sides of that equation: graduates and early-career professionals deciding where to apply, and HR teams outside those sectors who now have to compete for the same people.

A labour market that is cooling quickly

The backdrop is a steady deterioration. France’s unemployment rate reached 8.3% at the end of June, its highest level since the third quarter of 2020, according to INSEE, and it is expected to keep rising. Young people are hit hardest: INSEE puts unemployment among 15 to 24 year olds at 21.6% for the same quarter.

The latest registrations data point the same way. Per figures published on 28 October by France Travail (the public employment service formerly known as Pôle Emploi) and DARES, the labour ministry’s statistics office, the number of registered jobseekers with no activity at all rose 0.9% in the third quarter. Among under-25s registered in categories A, B and C, which cover both the fully unemployed and those in reduced activity, the count was up 3.4% year on year.

For a 23-year-old with a prestigious diploma, those numbers translate into longer searches, more applications and, often, more caution about which offer to accept.

What top graduates now want from an employer

Two studies published on 29 October by Universum, the Swedish employer-branding firm, show how that caution is reshaping preferences. The first surveyed 100,000 students across nine major economies, including 19,000 in France. The second questioned 6,560 French cadres (salaried managers and professionals) who graduated from grandes écoles, two-thirds of them aged 24 to 39.

Between 2025 and 2026, employer reputation rose 7 points among the priorities these managers cited. Job security gained 5 points among business-school graduates and 4 points among engineering graduates.

Two details matter for how you read this. First, salary has not been dethroned: pay remains the top priority for students worldwide, for students in France and for working managers. Second, respondents define security in concrete terms: a financially healthy company and durable contracts. Purpose at work and social or environmental commitments still feature, but they now rank lower among selection criteria.

In other words, the generation often described as mission-first is, under pressure, choosing employers it believes will still be there, and still paying, in five years.

Why defence and aerospace are winning the talent contest

Airbus, Safran and Thales sit at the top of the preferred-employer rankings. In Universum’s 2026 ranking of engineering students’ favourite employers, published by Les Échos in July and based on responses gathered between January and May, Thales came first with 20.8%, ahead of Airbus at 20.4% and Safran at 18.8%, with the same top three as in 2025.

The fit with the new priorities is not hard to see. These groups combine recognisable brands, long industrial programmes and the image of an order book that does not evaporate with the next downturn. For a graduate weighing financial durability, that is a strong signal before any conversation about pay or perks has started.

For employees and graduates: how to test an employer’s stability

Wanting security is reasonable. The risk is relying on brand prestige alone as a proxy for it. A few checks give you a clearer picture before you sign:

• Look at the numbers you can find. Listed companies publish annual results; many smaller ones file accounts you can consult. Revenue trends and recent rounds of layoffs tell you more than a careers page.
• Read the contract, not just the job title. If durability matters to you, ask early whether the role is an open-ended CDI or a fixed-term CDD, how long the trial period is, and which collective agreement applies.
• Ask stability questions in the interview. How has the team changed over the past two years? What happened to headcount in the last slowdown? How are projects funded? Good employers answer these plainly.
• Check what insiders say. Employer reviews from current and former staff often reveal restructuring, hiring freezes or high turnover long before they make the news.
• Keep pay on the table. Security and salary are not a trade you have to make blindly. Benchmark the role with a salary calculator or sector data so your salary negotiation starts from evidence, even in a tighter market.

A slower market can also widen your options rather than narrow them: mid-sized industrial firms, public bodies and regulated sectors rarely top student rankings, yet many offer exactly the financial solidity respondents say they want.

For HR: rebuilding trust when you are not a defence group

If you recruit outside defence and aerospace, the Universum findings carry a clear message: the purpose-led pitch that worked a few years ago is weaker currency on its own. Candidates are screening for durability, and they are reading reputation as evidence of it. Employers that handle this well tend to do a few things consistently:

• Make financial health legible. Explain your results, funding and multi-year plans in plain language in recruitment materials, rather than assuming candidates will find and interpret them.
• Be explicit about contracts. State contract type, trial period and progression path in the job ad. Ambiguity reads as risk to a candidate who has watched peers struggle for six months.
• Treat reputation as an operational metric. With reputation up 7 points as a priority, what employees say publicly about restructuring, management and pay now shapes your pipeline directly. Respond to reviews and fix the issues they surface.
• Anchor purpose in durability. Mission still matters to many candidates; it simply needs to sit on top of credible stability, not replace it.
• Stay transparent on pay. Salary remains the first criterion. Clear salary ranges and an honest explanation of how pay evolves are among the fastest ways to build trust with wary applicants.

None of this requires an order book in the billions. It requires showing candidates, with evidence, that a role with you is a safe bet as well as an interesting one.

What graduates are signalling is less a loss of idealism than a sharper sense of risk. If you are job hunting, the useful question is not only “does this employer inspire me?” but “will it still be standing, and paying me fairly, in three years?” Real accounts from people who work there are one of the best ways to answer it.

For HR teams, the same accounts are the raw material of the reputation candidates now rank above purpose, and the place where trust is either rebuilt or lost.