There’s a lot of noise at the moment about AI hollowing out entry-level work. Graduate schemes shrinking, first jobs disappearing, a generation locked out. Whatever the picture elsewhere, it isn’t what we’re seeing in Parliament.
With around 650 different employers on the estate, most MPs and hiring managers only ever see the skills picture inside their own office. Hive sits across all of it. We run recruitment for offices of every party and every size, which gives us a view most people never get: which skills are in demand, which are drying up, and how that shifts from one intake to the next.
Entry-level roles are holding up well. Tight budgets mean offices still lean on early-career staff, and the graduate applications we receive are strong. That is part of the challenge. When a hundred people apply for a first parliamentary role, most with good degrees, and some relevant experience behind them, a strong CV stops setting anyone apart. What separates candidates now is a narrower and more interesting set of skills.
Two stand out.
The first is digital communication. MPs are now expected to operate as broadcasters in their own right, and most don’t have that skill set themselves. So we hire for it. We want people who understand content creation, who grasp why an MP’s message needs to land a particular way, who know how different platforms and their algorithms behave, and who can turn round a decent video or photo edit without a production team.
This experience doesn’t has to come from a previous job. You pick these things up by doing them in your own life. We recently hired someone who had run a YouTube channel in her early teens. No formal experience, but she understood how to reach an audience, and that gave her a foundation most applicants lacked. If you want to build in this area, the tools are free and the tutorials are everywhere. Canva and YouTube alone will take you a long way, and time spent there shows.
The second is AI – but it isn’t what most applicants assume. We can all spot a generated CV or cover letter, and that isn’t what interests us. This isn’t about writing a clever prompt or producing content. We want people who use these tools to work better. Have you set something up that sends you a brief of the day ahead each morning? Are you using AI to scrape data, to juggle competing priorities, or to take the friction out of how you organise yourself? MPs are always chasing efficiencies and better office practice, so a staffer who already thinks that way brings something the office might not otherwise have.
The fundamentals still matter alongside all this. For anyone making a first move into Parliament, we want bright, switched-on people, and you don’t need a degree to be that. Switched on to politics, to current affairs, or to a particular MP’s brief and constituency: any of those helps. Being proactive matters just as much, working out what needs doing and how to be useful without waiting to be told, along with a tolerance for ambiguity and pace. Offices move fast and rarely tidily, and the people who hold their nerve in that environment are worth a great deal.
Looking across intakes, the differentiators move fast. In 2019 it was Canva and WhatsApp. By 2024 it was CapCut and AI. We don’t yet know what the next election will demand, but my guess is automation, smarter ways to make an office run, and people skills. As teams grow, so do the pressures inside them, and the staff who can build a team, keep it engaged and get the best out of others will be in real demand.
The thread through all of this is initiative. The offices worth working in aren’t looking for the finished article. They want people who bring something of their own and keep learning as the job keeps changing.
Hive Support provides specialist HR and recruitment support to MPs’ offices across Parliament. If you’re recruiting we’d be glad to talk.
