CV and job-hunt advice
Honest, UK-focused advice on tailoring your CV, beating applicant tracking systems, and actually getting a reply. Backed by 700+ real UK job adverts we read so you don't have to.
See the real applicant count on a LinkedIn job, not LinkedIn's rounded one
LinkedIn shows you "Over 100 people clicked apply" and stops there. The exact number is already sitting in your browser's Network tab. How to read it with DevTools, no extension or scraping involved, and what the number should and shouldn't change about how you apply.
12.9% of UK job adverts have never had a single application. For nursing, it is 43%.
We tracked 11,305 UK job adverts daily for eight weeks. 12.9% of adverts old enough to have had a fair week never received a single Reed application. Staff nurse adverts sit at 43.5%, receptionist at 3.9%. Adverts that vanish from the board entirely are worse: over a third left having had nothing at all.
The UK companies that never stop advertising: 9,455 adverts, 44 days
We watched UK job adverts once an hour for six weeks and counted which employers never stopped. Booker advertised on 37 of the 44 days, Costa on 29 across 128 towns, Specsavers in 196. The finding underneath it: only five of the twenty names posting the most adverts were the employer doing the hiring.
Band 6 nurse personal statement: what 321 NHS person specifications actually score (2026)
NHS Jobs no longer gives you one box. It asks for evidence against each essential criterion in turn, and the criteria are published on the advert. Measured across 321 Band 6 person specifications: the median is 11 essential criteria across 3 headings, mentoring and leadership roughly quadruple from Band 5, and clinical skills do not move at all.
Civil Service personal statement: what it is scored against, and how to write one (2026)
The personal statement is not a covering letter and not a summary of your CV. It is where you evidence the criteria the advert names, one at a time, and it is scored against those criteria rather than read for impression. What the published framework says about Experience, how the answer changes by grade, a worked rewrite, and the faults that lose marks.
Receptionist adverts drew 26 times more applicants than nursing adverts
We watched 2,482 UK job adverts from the hour they appeared, every day for a month. Not one of 233 staff nurse adverts reached ten Reed applications. Receptionist adverts reached ten 46% of the time. The median advert gets one application in its first 24 hours, so the rule about applying within the hour is wrong for every role we track.
We counted the benefits named in 1,804 UK job adverts. More than a third named none.
We logged every benefit named across 1,804 fresh UK adverts and 21 occupations, against a list of 23. The median advert names one. 38.5% name none at all. And comparing adverts naming more benefits against ones naming fewer, inside the same occupation, more does not buy more applicants. Pension is the closest thing to a norm, and even it goes with a shorter queue.