The top universities UK graduate recruiters are targeting in 2026 – and Oxford and Cambridge don’t make the top 10
A new university ranking shows that top employers are focusing their campus recruitment efforts on universities beyond Oxbridge, with Oxford and Cambridge not making the top 10 for employer visits and on-campus recruitment activities.
Published by High Fliers Research, the annual Graduate Market report, showcases the top universities targeted by some of the UK’s largest recruiters.
Using data from The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, which include Amazon, Barclays, the BBC, Civil Service, Google, HSBC, L’Oreal, Microsoft, P&G, PwC and Unilever, it explores the university campuses which are most regularly visited.
The five universities currently targeted by the largest number of the UK’s leading graduate employers are Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Warwick and University College London.
These institutions have attracted the most top graduate employers for university careers fairs, on-campus employer presentations, careers service promotions and initiatives, and other locally-run publicity during 2025-2026.
The top 20 universities targeted by employers in 2025-2026 include:
- Manchester (Good University Guide rank: #27)
- Birmingham (#16)
- Nottingham (#30)
- Warwick (#8)
- University College London (#9)
- Bristol (#10)
- Imperial College London (#6)
- Edinburgh (#19)
- Leeds (#25)
- Bath (#26)
- King’s College London (#7)
- Cambridge (#22)
- Exeter (#35)
- Durham (#18)
- Glasgow (#4)
- Queen Mary London (#17)
- Liverpool (#13)
- Oxford (#8)
- Southampton (#14)
- Sheffield (#3)
Notably, this list of universities bears little resemblance to The Times & Sunday Times Good University Guide 2026, the latest league table compiled from a range of institutional data.
The three universities most often targeted by the UK’s leading graduate employers – Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham – are only ranked in 16th, 27th and 30th places respectively in the Good University Guide.
And whilst the London School of Economics and St Andrews are currently in 1st and 2nd place respectively in the guide, neither institution appears amongst employers’ top twenty universities.
On-site recruiting
The report shows that the number of individual universities targeted by the UK’s top graduate employers for on-campus recruitment promotions such as university careers fairs, recruitment presentations, and local advertising grew steadily from an average of 19 universities in the 2011-2012 recruiting season to 27 universities in 2019-2020.
The move to fully-online recruitment during the pandemic prompted many employers to take a national or sector-led approach to their recruitment, rather than focussing their promotions at individual local universities. As a result, targeting in 2021-2022 dropped to an average of 22 universities per employer.
Employers returned to full programmes of on-campus events in autumn 2022 and targeting bounced back to an average of 27 universities for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 recruitment rounds.
With fewer graduates vacancies on offer in 2024-2025, the number of universities targeted by employers reduced to an average 24 universities, and has been cut further to an average of 23 universities in 2025-2026 with one in six employers no longer targeting any individual universities at all for their graduate recruitment.
Accounting & professional services firms, public sector employers and law firms have actively publicised their graduate vacancies at the largest number of local universities.
