ResumeGrade × Prospects, TargetJobs & Gradcracker

At a glance

Who each tool is built for

Where these platforms work well

• •Unmatched reach into the UK graduate employer market. Prospects, TargetJobs, and Gradcracker collectively represent where the majority of UK graduate schemes and internships are advertised. No careers service can replicate that employer access independently.
• •Free access for students and universities, funded through employer advertising. This removes procurement friction and means students can be directed to these platforms without any institutional cost decision.
• •Sector-specific depth at Gradcracker for engineering and technology students. The STEM focus means students applying to technical roles see relevant employers and sector-specific advice rather than generic graduate content.
• •Labour market insight from Prospects, including graduate destinations data and What Do Graduates Do?, which gives careers teams credible data for advising students on realistic outcomes by degree subject and institution.

Where the gap shows up

• •None of these platforms score CVs. Prospects, TargetJobs, and Gradcracker are job discovery and employer connection tools. They do not evaluate whether a student's CV is ready for the roles listed on them. A student with a poorly formatted, low-impact CV uses these platforms exactly the same way a well-prepared student does.
• •No signal for careers teams about cohort readiness. These platforms tell students where jobs are. They give careers teams no view of how prepared the cohort actually is. A careers advisor cannot open Prospects or TargetJobs and see that 30% of final-year students have CVs unlikely to pass the initial filter for the graduate schemes they are browsing.
• •No at-risk identification before applications open. These platforms have no mechanism to surface students who are unlikely to succeed in the application process based on CV quality. Careers teams discover struggling students reactively, after rejections have already arrived, rather than proactively, when intervention is still useful.
• •Job discovery without application readiness. Showing students relevant roles is genuinely valuable. Knowing whether those students are positioned to compete for those roles is a separate question that these platforms are not designed to answer and do not attempt to.

How ResumeGrade fills that gap

• •CV readiness before the application window opens. ResumeGrade runs cohort diagnostics in the weeks before graduate scheme application season begins. Careers teams see score distributions, readiness bands, and at-risk flags before students start submitting applications to roles on Prospects, TargetJobs, or Gradcracker.
• •JD alignment against specific graduate schemes. Once a student identifies a role on TargetJobs or a STEM position on Gradcracker, ResumeGrade lets them score their CV against that job description. The feedback shifts from generic improvement to positioning for the specific role they are actually applying to.
• •A decision tool for careers advisors, not just students. These graduate platforms serve the student. ResumeGrade serves the careers team. The advisor dashboard gives employability teams the cohort data they need to decide where to direct workshop resource, which students to book in for one-to-one CV reviews, and how the batch is tracking against readiness targets before the season starts.
• •Running before and alongside, not instead of. Students should still use Prospects, TargetJobs, and Gradcracker. These platforms are where UK graduate jobs live. ResumeGrade is the layer that ensures students are ready to compete for those jobs when they find them.

The bottom line

Prospects, TargetJobs, and Gradcracker are not the problem. They are well-run platforms that serve a clear function: connecting UK students to graduate opportunities. Every careers service should be pointing students toward them. That is not what ResumeGrade is for.

The gap is what happens before a student applies. These platforms surface the opportunity. They do not tell a student whether their CV is ready for it, and they do not tell a careers team which students in the cohort are likely to fail the application screen before they have had a chance to improve. ResumeGrade addresses that stage. The question for any careers service is not whether to use these platforms. It is whether students are actually prepared for the opportunities those platforms surface. Right now, most careers teams have no systematic answer to that question. ResumeGrade is how you get one.