Companies have been recruiting graduates from a smaller pool of personal connections during the pandemic, shutting out young people from less privileged backgrounds, a survey shows. More than half (57%) of recruiters said they had become more reliant on personal networks and word-of-mouth recommendations, while more than a quarter (28%) said they were more likely to hire someone they already knew because they saw them as a safer bet in uncertain times. During the pandemic, nearly two-thirds (63%) of recruiters have turned to online networks on platforms such as LinkedIn to compensate for the absence of in-person contact, making these a new frontier for nepotism, the study suggests. “Tech should be a huge leveller. The nepotism which exists in industry, where business leaders rely on existing contacts to fuel recruitment pipelines, ought to be a thing of the past, and equal access of opportunity should finally be a reality. But at the moment it’s simply not happening. Employers are swapping one closed network with another,” wrote Dimitar Stanimiroff, a general manager at networking platform Handshake, which produced the report. Nearly a third (30%) of the recruiters – who were senior decision-makers at a range of businesses – said they had turned to colleagues for candidate recommendations, while a quarter (24%) had asked friends and nearly a fifth (17%) had asked friends. The recruiters also said they had become more reliant on job sites during the pandemic, and turned less to university careers services and campus careers fairs. A quarter said they had been proactively targeting students based on their online profiles. Two-thirds of businesses (66%) plan to conduct more of the recruitment process online in future. As well as surveying more than 500 HR professionals, researchers at Savanta agency, which compiled the data, spoke to 640 students and 334 recent graduates in the UK. A third (33%) of those looking for jobs thought interviews and applications were biased towards their better-connected peers, and 15% worried that their background would stand in the way of employment. A fifth (22%) said they lacked the technology to access online careers services.