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.
Questions to ask at the end of a UK job interview, ranked by what 1,349 adverts left out
Most interview advice tells you to perform curiosity. We read 1,349 live UK job adverts and counted the facts they never give you instead. 98% never name who you would report to, 41% never state the weekly hours and 60% never mention a shift or rota. The three questions worth your two minutes, the imported American ones that go nowhere in a care home, and one popular question with a downside nobody mentions.
5,681 job adverts, 887 employers. Your search is smaller than it looks.
We tracked every advert in ten UK occupations once a day for twelve days. 345 pharmacy assistant adverts came from 14 employers, and Asda posted 57% of them. Optical assistant: 555 adverts, 36 employers, half of them Specsavers. The advert count is not the employer count, and for some roles it is not close.
Teaching assistant adverts ask about safeguarding eight times more often than GCSEs
541 UK teaching assistant adverts. Safeguarding appears in 73.9% and a DBS check in 74.9%, against 8.9% for GCSEs and 4.4% for a degree. 58.2% name no qualification at all. The thing that stops people applying is not the thing being screened for.
Most advertised teaching assistant work is a day rate, not a salary
We re-read 541 UK teaching assistant adverts from their original pages. Of those quoting pay, 77.5% quote a daily rate of roughly £85 to £120, not an annual salary. Two in three posts are temporary or contract. And the whole set comes from just 43 advertisers, one supply agency accounting for a quarter of it. Only 16.3% say term-time only.
The most undervalued line on a UK CV is the one about your driving licence
People add it without thinking and cut it when they run out of room. Adverts asking for a driving licence draw a median of 5.75 fewer applicants than comparable jobs in the same occupation. In customer service the gap is 1 applicant against 11. And in the two trades built on driving, 16 of 30 bus operators will fund the licence for you.
Product manager adverts asking for AI advertise £82,500. The ones that do not advertise £56,000.
Deel says AI-augmented workers earn 62% more, citing our count of how rarely UK adverts name AI at all. So we tested the advertised-pay half: 1,804 fresh UK adverts, compared inside the same occupation. The premium is real and large in one job family. Also, 0.6% of adverts will tell you which tool they mean, and not one banned AI-written applications.
Cleaner adverts quote one exact wage 86% of the time. AI engineer adverts never do.
Everybody reads the salary line for the number. Nobody reads the shape. We measured 3,925 UK adverts: 35% of the ones that state a band state the same figure twice, and the lower the job sits the more precise that figure gets. A single number is an advert telling you there is nothing to discuss.