Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) research has confirmed what many young jobseekers in the UK are already experiencing at the sharp end: nearly one in three employers said they were less likely to consider an applicant under 25, before that candidate had even submitted a CV. The reasons given, centred on health, soft skills, and work readiness, have begun to look less like isolated hiring judgements and more like a structural pattern at precisely the moment the UK's statutory sick pay regime changed in their disfavour.

The timing sharpens the picture. The DWP findings land alongside Office for National Statistics (ONS) data showing that 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training (NEET) between April and June. That is a labour-market squeeze concentrated almost entirely on one age group, and the two signals together warrant a careful read from both young candidates and the HR teams whose hiring funnels may be quietly narrowing.

What the DWP research found

The headline figure is stark: 32% of employers said they were less likely to hire an applicant under 25. The DWP data behind that number is what gives it weight. Nearly two-thirds of employers surveyed, 62%, believed young people were less ready to excel at work than other age groups. When asked to name specific difficulties in recruiting under-25s, 41% pointed to soft skills or work readiness and 40% cited a lack of work experience. Resilience was flagged by 32% and technical skills by 31%.

The curriculum critique was even more pronounced. Three in four employers, 76%, said that current educational programmes did not adequately prepare young people for the world of work, and 91% stated they wanted more vocational pathways into employment. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which tracks employer sentiment through its annual surveys, has consistently flagged the gap between formal education outcomes and employer expectations in entry-level hiring. That consensus makes the DWP numbers credible, not aberrant.

Health added a separate dimension. Some 23% of employers named young people's health as a difficulty when hiring. Among large employers specifically, 21% reported recruiting young people with a mental health condition or cognitive impairment, and 15% had hired young people with a physical health condition or impairment. The one category where under-25s were rated more favourably than older workers was digital skills, a genuine advantage that deserves to be used deliberately.

Why Day 1 sick pay shifted the calculation

Until recently, statutory sick pay (SSP) under the Employment Rights Act 1996 only became payable after a three-day waiting period. The Employment Rights Act 2025 removed those waiting days, meaning new employees are entitled to SSP from the first day of illness, with no qualifying wait and no lost days at the front of a claim. For the vast majority of workers this is a genuine and straightforward improvement in their baseline protection.

For some hiring managers running informal risk calculations on candidates they already perceive as more likely to take sick leave, however, it introduced a new variable. Brett Hill, head of health and protection at independent consultancy Broadstone, connected the two directly. He said it was little surprise that almost a quarter of employers now saw young people's health as a barrier to hiring, especially given the recent introduction of Day 1 sick pay for new employees.

Hill also placed the pattern against a wider structural backdrop. He noted that long waits for NHS care were leaving many people without support or treatment for health concerns, while mental health challenges were increasingly affecting young people's ability to enter and remain in work. His argument is not that employers are wrong to note a cost signal; it is that acting on that signal by filtering out a whole age cohort is both legally exposed and operationally counterproductive, a point the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has underlined in its published guidance on age as a protected characteristic.

The NEET picture behind the headline

The ONS figure of 981,000 NEET young people aged 16 to 24 is not a clean upward trend. The total was 30,000 higher than a year earlier, but it also fell by 30,000 compared with the previous quarter. What moved sharply was the gender breakdown: the number of young men classified as NEET rose by 25,000 year-on-year, compared with a rise of 4,000 for young women. That disparity deserves sector-level analysis, given that industries such as construction and manufacturing, which historically absorb young male entrants, have faced their own structural pressures since 2020.

Hill's assessment of the wider stakes was direct. He said that with almost a million young people now outside education or employment, tackling the poor health of the next generation of workers needed to be seen as a national priority. Whether that framing translates into policy action from the DWP, the Department for Education, or through ACAS-led guidance to employers, remains to be seen. The NEET number itself is the data point to watch in each ONS quarterly release.

For candidates under 25: navigating a market that has already priced in assumptions about you

The DWP data reflects a pre-formed view held by a meaningful share of employers before any individual application is assessed. That does not make every application futile, but it does mean generic advice to apply broadly and hope is less effective than it once was. A few targeted adjustments are likely to shift the odds more than volume alone.

• Front-load evidence of work readiness. The DWP findings cluster around soft skills, resilience, and practical experience. Any paid or unpaid role, project managed against a deadline, or output delivered for a named stakeholder belongs on the first page of your CV, not buried later. The hiring manager forming a view about your age band needs to encounter counter-evidence before the bias solidifies.
• Use your digital advantage deliberately. Digital skills was the one category where under-25s were rated more favourably than older workers. Generic phrases such as tech-savvy add nothing. Naming specific tools, platforms, or measurable outputs gives the hiring manager something concrete to anchor on.
• Prioritise employers with structured entry routes. The 91% of employers who said they wanted more vocational pathways are telling you where appetite actually converts into offers. Apprenticeship schemes, graduate rotational programmes, and structured trainee pipelines assess candidates on demonstrated ability rather than CV proxies, which is where much of the under-25 penalty is concentrated.
• Know your rights on health disclosure. Under the Equality Act 2010, employers are prohibited from asking health-related questions before making a conditional job offer, outside of narrow, defined exceptions. If health information comes up at an inappropriate stage, you are not required to answer, and ACAS publishes clear guidance on what disclosures are and are not lawfully required at each stage of recruitment.

The broader point is that this is a market-wide signal, not a verdict on any individual. Regional NEET concentrations, sector composition, and whether a specific employer has invested in young-hire pipelines all affect your actual odds more than any single CV adjustment. Verified salary and interview data from real employees in your target sector can help you identify which organisations have a demonstrable track record of hiring and developing under-25s, rather than those whose stated appetite for young talent does not survive contact with their hiring funnels.

For HR and hiring managers: the legal and operational read

If your organisation's shortlisting patterns have been quietly deprioritising under-25 candidates, or a hiring manager has argued that Day 1 sick pay makes younger hires a cost risk, there are two overlapping problems worth addressing before they compound.

1. Legal exposure under the Equality Act 2010. Age is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. A hiring pattern that screens out under-25s on the basis of assumed health risk, without an individually justified and objectively documented reason, enters age-discrimination territory under Part 2 of the Act. Where the assumed risk relates to mental health, a disability-discrimination strand may also arise under Schedule 1. Concern about sick pay costs does not, on its own, constitute a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, which is the legal test for justifying indirectly discriminatory practices. ACAS guidance on age discrimination in recruitment sets out the framework in plain terms and is a useful starting point for a manager-level briefing.

2. Talent-pipeline risk. With NEET numbers close to one million and the male NEET cohort rising fastest, sectors that depend on entry-level pipelines, including hospitality, retail, social care, logistics, and early-career professional services, face a structural problem if they withdraw from under-25 recruitment. A short-term risk adjustment becomes a medium-term vacancy that cannot be filled from older age groups at equivalent cost or scale. The CIPD's annual Labour Market Outlook data consistently shows that entry-level roles take longest to fill when employer expectations and candidate supply are misaligned at the point of first contact.

Hill's argument to employers was that the productive response was not to pull back from the market but to redesign the wellbeing offer around what younger workers actually need. He said employers could not solve the pressures facing the NHS, but they could put in place workplace wellbeing programmes that ensured new employees entering the workplace could access support and treatment for conditions the NHS could not address, conditions that might otherwise affect their productivity or result in them taking time off sick.

Practically, a quarterly audit of the following areas is likely to surface where bias is entering the funnel:

• Shortlisting criteria and applicant tracking filters. If any scoring rubric or automated filter uses proxies for age, such as graduation year or first-employment date, document the objective business reason or remove it. Under the Equality Act 2010, indirectly discriminatory criteria require justification; absence of documentation leaves the organisation exposed in any Employment Tribunal claim.
• Structured interview frameworks for work readiness. The DWP finding that soft skills and work readiness are perceived as lacking is also a finding about how hiring managers assess those qualities, which is inconsistently and informally. Giving managers a structured competency-based framework converts a generalised perception about an age group into an evidence-based judgement about an individual. ACAS publishes guidance on structured interviewing that HR teams can adapt without significant resource.
• The wellbeing benefits mix. Employee Assistance Programmes with realistic access times, mental health cover that goes beyond a basic helpline, and early-intervention musculoskeletal support are the categories most likely to reduce the absence pattern that employers say they are concerned about in younger hires. These also improve retention across all age groups, which strengthens the business case for investment.
• Apprenticeship and structured entry programmes. These routes allow assessment of candidates on actual performance rather than CV signals, which is precisely where the under-25 penalty is most pronounced. For organisations in England, the Apprenticeship Levy provides a funding mechanism that is already sunk; using it for structured young-hire pipelines converts a payroll cost into a talent-development asset.

Hill acknowledged the budget reality that most HR teams face. He said that well-designed, cost-effective support targeted at the issues younger workers were actually facing could help employers attract and retain the next generation of talent, while giving young people a better chance of building healthy, productive working lives, and that this did not have to mean expensive, one-size-fits-all programmes.

The signal to watch next

Two data releases will indicate whether the current picture represents a moment or a sustained trend. The next ONS NEET quarterly publication will show whether the sharp rise in young male NEET figures is stabilising or continuing to widen relative to the female cohort. And if the DWP commissions a follow-up wave of the employer survey, the 32% figure is the number to track. If it rises alongside continued Day 1 sick pay coverage and a tightening entry-level market, the hypothesis that a statutory change is reshaping hiring decisions by age group moves from a plausible inference to a matter requiring a policy response.

For now, the data is uncomfortable but actionable. Candidates under 25 can address, directly and specifically, the concerns that employers named in the DWP research, positioning evidence of readiness before assumptions about risk have time to form. HR teams and hiring managers can pressure-test their own shortlisting funnels for the same patterns before those patterns surface in an Employment Tribunal claim under the Equality Act 2010, or in a run of entry-level vacancies that consistently fail to close. Both of those outcomes are preventable. The data is in hand; the decision about what to do with it sits with the organisations and individuals reading it.