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• Institutions’ substantial holdings in Barry Callebaut implies that they have significant influence over the company’s share price

• 52% of the business is held by the top 4 shareholders

• Using data from analyst forecasts alongside ownership research, one can better assess the future performance of a company

This technology could replace computers: discover the 20 stocks are working to make quantum computing a reality.

A look at the shareholders of Barry Callebaut AG (VTX:BARN) can tell us which group is most powerful. We can see that institutions own the lion’s share in the company with 34% ownership. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

And institutional investors saw their holdings value drop by 9.7% last week. Needless to say, the recent loss which further adds to the one-year loss to shareholders of 39% might not go down well especially with this category of shareholders. Often called “market movers”, institutions wield significant power in influencing the price dynamics of any stock. As a result, if the downtrend continues, institutions may face pressures to sell Barry Callebaut, which might have negative implications on individual investors.

Let’s delve deeper into each type of owner of Barry Callebaut, beginning with the chart below.

View our latest analysis for Barry Callebaut

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it’s included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

Barry Callebaut already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. This suggests some credibility amongst professional investors. But we can’t rely on that fact alone since institutions make bad investments sometimes, just like everyone does. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It’s therefore worth looking at Barry Callebaut’s earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Hedge funds don’t have many shares in Barry Callebaut. Jacobs Holding AG is currently the largest shareholder, with 31% of shares outstanding. With 10% and 6.5% of the shares outstanding respectively, Artisan Partners Limited Partnership and UBS Asset Management AG are the second and third largest shareholders.

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As a frequent Amazon shopper you pay £95 for an annual Prime subscription, so when an email arrives warning the price is going up you are quick to react.

But the email, which includes a button to click on to “cancel” the subscription, is a scam and sent by fraudsters trying to steal your account login and payment details.

After a recent surge in customers reporting fake messages, Amazon emailed its more than 200 million Prime members globally to warn them. The company took this step to ensure “scammers are not using our brand to take advantage of people who trust us” and “educate consumers to avoid impersonation scams”.

What the scam looks like

The fake emails claim your Amazon Prime subscription will automatically renew at an unexpected price (in the UK the service costs £95 a year or £8.99 a month).

The messages sometimes include personal information gleaned from other sources in an attempt to appear legitimate. They may also include a “cancel subscription” button that clicks through to a fake Amazon login page.

This is not the only tactic being used to prey on Amazon shoppers. Earlier this year, the retailer warned of a “striking” increase in phone-based impersonation scams in the UK. It also said that fraudsters were responding to customer complaints on social media using counterfeit profiles.

What messages ask for

They urge you to act quickly to make a payment. When you click through you will be asked for personal and payment details.

What to do

Do not click on any links in these messages. The scammers are trying to steal your login and other sensitive personal information. You can just ignore the email or forward it on to amazon.co.uk/reportascam.

As the scams happen away from its platform, the more consumers report them, the better Amazon’s systems become at identifying those responsible. Last year, it got more than 55,000 phishing websites and 12,000 phone numbers shutdown.

Amazon says: “We encourage consumers to report suspected scams to us, so that we can protect their accounts and refer bad actors to law enforcement.”

If you are keen to check the status of your Prime membership, open the Amazon mobile app, or go directly to Amazon.co.uk. Select “Prime” from the main menu to view your membership status, renewal dates, and plan details.

To check if a message is really from Amazon visit the “message centre” under the “your account” tab. Legitimate messages will appear there.

If you clicked on a suspicious link, monitor your credit or debit card statements for unfamiliar charges, and contact your bank immediately about unauthorised transactions.

To avoid falling victim to a scam, Amazon advises customers to use its apps, or type amazon.co.uk in the browser (you could bookmark this link). Remember the company will never request sensitive information outside the website or app.

Also consider enabling two-step verification for extra security. You can do this via your account’s “login & security settings” or at amazon.co.uk/2SV. Once you’ve activated this feature every time you log in you will be sent a code to input alongside your password.

Another option is to enable Passkey to use your face, fingerprint, or the PIN that you use to unlock your device, to sign into your account.

Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs.

“I assumed it wouldn’t be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications],” she said. “However, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been ‘carefully reviewed’. About 70% of jobs I didn’t hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for.”

AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. “Thousands of people are applying to the same jobs now – on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied].”

In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under £30k, “which isn’t that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax”.

Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history.

As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country.

Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master’s degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May.

“I’ve applied to about 150 entry-level jobs – in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,” she said. “So far I’ve had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream.

“Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they’re looking for. It feels dystopian.”

One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. “I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to,” Martyna said. “Both of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have £90,000 in student debt – for what?

“They told us: ‘If you don’t go to university, you could be working in McDonald’s.’ I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland.”

Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree.

“Jobs don’t care if you have a degree,” said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022.

“I have a degree in visual communication and can’t get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I’m frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I’m finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college.”

Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. “It’s the best I could get,” she said.

Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI.

“[I’ve read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don’t know how to filter them,” Schurer said.

“If everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market.”

Her older son, she said, had spent a “soul-destroying” five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections.

“It appears that it’s back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck,” she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents.

“AI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one’s success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know,” agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. “But gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal.”

The job market his students were graduating into was “tough, and about to get tougher”, he predicted.

“While companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs.”

This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework.

“Being able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago,” said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. “Now, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve.

“Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.”

Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access.

“What people want to do and what they’re actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this,” said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England.

“But sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare.”

Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning £700-£800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since.

“I’ve been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications – in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service,” he said.

Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was “no-brainer” that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely.

“I think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues.”

While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality.

“My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in,” said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master’s in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position.

“There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level,” she said.

The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications.

“The job I’ve been offered is not using the skills I have,” she said. “I just want to use my degree.”

One of the UK’s biggest recruiters is accelerating a plan to switch towards more frequent face-to-face assessments as university graduates become increasingly reliant on using artificial intelligence to apply for jobs.

Teach First, a charity which fast-tracks graduates into teaching jobs, said it planned to bring forward a move away from predominantly written assignments – where AI could give applicants hidden help – to setting more assessments where candidates carry out tasks such as giving “micro lessons” to assessors.

The move comes as the number of people using AI for job applications has risen from 38% last year, to 50% this year, according to a study by the graduate employment specialist Bright Network.

Patrick Dempsey, the executive director for programme talent at Teach First, said there had been a near-30% increase in applications so far this year on the same period last year, with AI playing a significant role.

Dempsey said the surge in demand for jobs was partly due to a softening in the labour market, but the use of automation for applications was allowing graduates to more easily apply for multiple jobs simultaneously.

“The shift from written assessment to task-based assessment is something we feel the need to accelerate,” he said.

Dempsey said much of the AI use went undetected but there could be tell-tale signs. “There are instances where people are leaving the tail end of a ChatGPT message in an application answer, and of course they get rejected,” he said.

A leading organisation in graduate recruitment said the proportion of students and university leavers using AI to apply for jobs had risen to five out of 10 applicants. Bright Network, which connects graduates and young professionals to employers, found half of graduates and undergraduates now used AI for their applications.

More than a quarter of companies questioned in a survey of 15,000 people will be setting guidelines for AI usage in job applications, in time for the next recruitment season.

Kirsten Barnes, head of the digital platform at Bright Network, said employers had noticed a “surge” in applications.

“AI tools make it easier for candidates of any age – not just graduates – to apply to many, many different roles,” she said. “Employers have been saying to us that what they’re seeing is a huge surge in the volume of applications that they’re receiving.”

Breakthroughs in AI have coincided with downward pressure on the graduate and junior jobs market.

Dartmouth Partners, a recruitment agency specialising in the financial services sector, said it was increasingly seeing applicants using keywords written in white on their CVs. The words are not visible to the human eye, but would instruct a system to push the candidate to the next phase of the recruitment process if a prospective employer was using AI to screen applications.

Vacancies for graduate jobs, apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs with no degree requirement have dropped by 32% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, according to research released last month by the job search site Adzuna. These entry-level jobs now account for 25% of the market in the UK, down from 28.9% in 2022, it found.

Last month, another job search site, Indeed, reported that university graduates were facing the toughest job market since 2018, finding the number of roles advertised for recent graduates had fallen 33% in mid-June compared with the same point last year.

The Institute of Student Employers said the graduate and school-leaver market as a whole was not declining as rapidly as reported, however. Its survey of 69 employers showed job vacancies aimed at graduates were down by 7% but school-leaver vacancies were up by 23% – meaning there was an overall increase of 1% in a market earmarked for AI impact.

Group GTI, a charity that helps students move into employment, said job postings on UK university careers job boards were up by 8% this year compared with last year.

Interviews with graduate recruitment agencies and experts have found that AI has yet to cause severe disruption to the market for school and university leavers – but change is inevitable and new joiners to the white-collar economy must become skilled in AI to stand a chance of progressing.

James Reed, the chief executive of the Reed employment agency, said he “feels sorry” for young people who have racked up debt studying for degrees and are encountering a tough jobs market. “I think universities should be looking at this and thinking quite carefully about how they prepare young people,” he said.

He added that AI would transform the entire job market. “This change is fundamental and five years from now it’s going to look very different – the whole job market,” he said.