Look around the Dunham McCarthy Group office and you won’t see anyone below the age of 30. But this wasn’t always the case. The Staffordshire-based legal and financial services firm used to always hire school leavers, training them up over a six-year programme.
The duties of these young staff members would involve conducting research, data entry, drafting documents and contracts, and completing forms. Now, thanks to a mix of AI tools the company has developed and readily available large language models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, they say there’s little need to get teenagers to do them any more.
As a result, the 80-strong firm’s director and co-founder, Alex Clansey, made the call four years ago that more mature hires would be better equipped to deal with the demands of his clients – while also managing administrative tasks via AI.
“When AI came along, suddenly you could do 10 times as much in the same time frame. We see maybe 1,000 clients a month, and we’ve got 10 advisors. We couldn’t do that without technology – we’d probably only be able to see 200 clients a month,” says Clansey.
Now, the company’s “entry-level” staff are a whole lot older, as the teenage hires of the past would technically have nothing to do, thanks to AI. “You wouldn’t put them in front of a client [because they don’t have enough experience], and they can’t contribute the way they used to, so what are they going to do for six years?” Clansey says.
Clansey’s “juniors” now tend to be in their 30s and 40s and are often career changers: a trend he’s seeing is teachers with a law degree exiting that profession to rediscover a legal career [around 40,000 full-time teachers left their roles in education in 2024, according to government data]. They have strong social, people and communication skills and, with the technology available, can be trained in months rather than years to “bridge the gap between technology and the client”, as Clansey puts it.
The perils of hiring younger employees
Hiring young people used to be the way companies kept their wage bills down. A highly paid but small management team would steer the ship, deploying the crew for the heavy lifting.
But that model is now becoming less attractive to employers for many reasons. From 6 April, employer national insurance contributions will increase from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, with the employer threshold reducing from £9,100 to £5,000, meaning they must pay it sooner. The National Living Wage for people aged 21 and over will also increase to £12.71 an hour, up from £11.44 in 2024. All this is fuelling a crisis in youth unemployment, with the government announcing this week that companies will be paid a £3,000 grant for employing a person aged 18 – 24 who has been searching for a job for six months or more.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that hiring a young person could cost up to 40 per cent more – making it seem like a better deal to hire someone with more experience.
But for Clansey, the payoff hasn’t been about the finances. His school leavers were certainly a lot cheaper – minimum age apprentices that would evolve into 20-something executives on salaries of around £25,000 to £30,000. Now, staff at what used to be that level would be commanding double to triple that rate, so Clansey’s wage bill – 80 per cent of the business’s costs – is actually now higher.
But where he is winning is in client gains. He gives the example of a client he advised on inheritance tax. Working with AI, he was able to spot a £140,000 saving they could make because the AI has such in-depth knowledge of the tax and legal systems that it can advise solutions that workers might not have thought of, or taken a long time to come across. “Everyone’s operating at a much higher level. The quality of what we do has gone through the roof. We’re doing more, better, and with fewer mistakes,” Clansey confirms.
“We’re paying people to interact with clients. Our AI system will tell an advisor what to advise and highlight exactly what we can and can’t do. So the knowledge has been removed and it becomes almost a sales job; it’s now a relationship-based job. To be the face of the company,” he explains.
Clansey adds: “It’s all about personality for us. You don’t tend to develop a stronger personality until you’re older. Graduates tend to be more quiet and introverted, and that’s not what we’re after anymore.”
Clansey is also concerned about reliability and the ability to just get on with things. “You don’t have to wait for them to grow up. Previously, investing six years in someone would be worthwhile. Now, you don’t do that. And now, we don’t have some of the problems that are associated with an 18 or 19-year-old saying, ‘I don’t think I’m going to come in this week, because it might snow’,” he says.
Ditching the graduate programme
At Iplicit, an accounting and finance software company, CEO Lyndon Stickley has a similar philosophy: equip more mature staff with AI tools to automate traditionally junior tasks like analysis, reporting and document drafting, in lieu of managing a team of juniors.
Stickley has equipped more mature staff with AI tools to automate junior tasks (Photo: Rick Pushinsky)It’s saving him from having to hire around 50 roles, as he had originally planned to grow from 220 people to 330 by the end of 2028, but he says he can now level out at around 280.
Stickley does take on the odd number of graduates in roles like engineering, but otherwise, he also favours people in their 30s and up, in key roles such as sales and customer support. Even for Iplicit’s most junior roles, he’d like at least five years of experience.
His reasons are varied – like Clansey, he wants people who can just crack on, citing the business’s fast pace of growth overshadowing its ability to nurture younger hires. He’s also committed to remote working, which he believes doesn’t offer the right environment for someone in the early stages of their career. So he’s made the call not to introduce a graduate programme.
“AI is doing all of the entry-level work: entry-level coding, entry-level copywriting, entry-level support tickets and so on,” says London-based Stickley. “A more experienced person could be driving with AI tools that could effectively replicate a team of five people.
“We’re not ageist – but we like to hire for experience.”
Recruiter and coach Sarah Bishop can sympathise. With the increased cost of hiring younger workers, more of her clients are moving towards more experienced hires. She also has had clients come to her frustrated with an underperforming graduate cohort.
But Bishop’s understanding only goes so far – and she’s questioning whether bosses like Clansey and Stickley are shirking their responsibilities for supporting the next generation. “I think we’ve got to the point as a society where everybody needs to start taking a bit of responsibility,” says Bishop, who’s the founder and CEO of Recruit Recruit.
“Employers can’t keep blaming the government and the school system. You’re part of the problem if you keep saying, ‘I want someone who can hit the ground running’, because somebody’s got to bring the talent through at some stage.
“If nobody is going to bring people through, we’re going to have a real problem.”
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