How hard is it to get a Big Four job when you graduate?
In a nutshell: very, very difficult indeed.
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Big Four firms are generally pretty cagey with their acceptance rates. It’s understandable – they’re private companies, and even publicly-traded ones have no obligation to disclose how hard it is to get in.
Sometimes that information reaches the public, however. PwC, for example, was mentioned in a Times article last year as having an acceptance rate of around 2.5% in 2022, presumably in the UK. That was based on 304,000 applications to 7,400 open positions, more or less on par with what a big investment bank receives.
Deloitte, the biggest of the Big Four, receives around two million applications per year to its US operations alone according to Business Insider. Headcount, meanwhile, was basically flat from 2023 to 2024, increasing from 171.1k to 172.8k.
The specific number of new student hires is harder to approximate, but in the UK there were 2,500 graduates and apprentices across the firm’s 26,000-strong workforce. Assuming the ratio of graduates to other employees is the same in the USA, there are around 17,000 graduates joining the firm in the States. The acceptance rate, therefore, is around 0.85% in the US alone.
KPMG, the smallest of the Big Four by most metrics, is tougher to parse. According to careers advice site thecambridgeconsultant, the firm received around 50,000 applicants to 3,900 roles in the USA, an acceptance rate of around 7.8%. The higher number might be on account of KPMG having a proportionally smaller consulting practice than its rivals – and consulting is the most competitive Big Four role to get into.
EY might have the clearest figures. The firm told us earlier this year that it receives “around 70,000 applications for our student programmes every year” in the UK, of which it hires around 2,000. That’s a conversion rate of around 2.9% in the UK alone.
Whatever the numbers “really” are, it’s clear enough that they’re far, far more accepting than financial services firms are. Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan had acceptance rates of 0.8% and 0.9% respectively for 2024: private equity firms such as Blackstone had acceptance rates of 0.25% last year.
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