Thousands of highflying graduates, who made banking their first career choice for years, are risking major disappointment as they fight for places as accountants and lawyers.

Talent is flocking to a handful of leading professional services firms as the banking sector loses its appeal in the wake of the financial crisis, The Times has learnt.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the largest of the Big Four accounting firms, received an average of about 35 applications a day in February – more than 1,000 in total and roughly the same number of graduates the firm expects to recruit all year.

Slaughter and May, the City’s most prestigious law firm, has also benefited from the turmoil in the financial sector. This week it said that it would stop taking applications from nonlaw graduates for its next trainee intake, such was the increase in the number of outstanding candidates it received this year.

Michael Barnard, an executive at Milkround, the graduate recruitment website, said that financial institutions had scaled back their graduate intake and were being pickier about those they hire. Banks are now looking for candidates with specialist qualifications and some form of financial work experience – and that has left thousands of students with degrees in subjects such as English and History frantically competing for places at the dwindling number of top City institutions that are still recruiting.

PwC said that it had seen a 50 per cent jump in graduate applications since it began its latest recruitment drive in September. In February, the number jumped again, with applications 120 per cent higher than during the same month last year.

“We’ve seen a huge increase already this year and, going by the attendance at our on-campus events, we expect this to continue,” Ian Powell, the firm’s UK chairman and senior partner, said. “Clearly the downturn is encouraging more graduates to reassess their priorities and look for professional skills and training, which will equip them for recession as well as growth periods.”

PwC is the UK’s largest professional services firm in terms of the number of employees – more than 16,000 – and revenue of £2.2 billion. Last year it received more than 70,000 applications from experienced and graduate job-seekers. But during the recent boom years even the best professional services firms struggled to lure the brightest young talent as ambitious commercially minded graduates found the lure of a career at the likes of Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers more alluring.

However, the recruitment landscape appears to have changed dramatically as the leading financial institutions make swingeing cutbacks and face increasing pressure to scrap their generous bonus structures.

Slaughter and May, the only “magic circle” law firm not to have made redundancies as a result of the financial crisis, has also leapt to the top of the list of the City’s preferred employers.

It received about 2,000 applications for 95 places in its 2011 trainee intake. Graham White, executive partner, said that was an increase on previous years but more startling was the quality of the candidates now applying.

“We’ve had a significantly higher number of very good quality applications and it makes the choice very difficult,” he said. “Before, we weren’t even competing against [banks such as] Goldman Sachs because people who wanted to go there wouldn’t have even applied to us,” Mr White said. “Now there’s less of a Goldman option they are applying to us.”

This week the firm said that it had received interest from so many outstanding candidates that it would be a waste of time interviewing any more nonlaw graduates. It is still holding open places for graduates with law degrees, who will not be interviewed until next year.

Trainee lawyers at Slaughter and May can expect to start on a salary of £38,000, rising to more than £70,000 after qualifying as a solicitor two years later.

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