A store cleaning job at an Aldi in London collected 1,461 applications. In the same dataset, 199 adverts collected nobody at all. Both facts came out of the same month, the same job board and the same country. Almost everything jobseekers are told about the UK market falls apart somewhere in the gap between those two numbers.
Over the past three months we have been counting. 15,291 unique UK job adverts, pulled from NHS Jobs, the government's Find a Job service, Indeed and the Reed API. 5,967 of them read by hand across 33 occupations. Another 5,704 watched hour by hour for 13 days straight, 168 snapshots, so we could see applications arrive rather than guess at them. 64,962 applications counted in one July sample alone.
We did it because the advice industry runs on assertions. Apply in the first hour. Beat the robot. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Nobody shows their working. Here is ours, and here are the ten things that surprised us most.
Finding 1
62%
of all applications go to just 10% of adverts
We counted 64,962 applications across 1,807 live adverts in July. The top tenth of adverts by popularity absorbed 62.4% of them. The bottom half, some 900 jobs, shared 3.8% between them. One in nine adverts had received nothing at all when we looked.
This is the single most useful thing in the whole dataset. The UK job market is not one queue, it is thousands of queues of wildly different lengths, and most jobseekers keep joining the same handful of very long ones. The crowded adverts are crowded because they are easy to find and easy to apply to, which is exactly why they are the worst use of your afternoon.
Finding 2
0
applications on the median advert in its first three hours
"Apply within the hour" is the most repeated piece of advice in job hunting, so we tested it properly. We tracked 1,003 adverts from the hour they first appeared and watched the counter move.
The median advert gained zero applications in its first three hours. One by six hours. Two by twelve. Three by a full day. Seven after four days. The stampede people are told to outrun does not exist on day one. What exists is a slow trickle, and the CV that lands on Wednesday tailored properly will beat the one that landed on Monday in a panic.
The clock still matters at the other end. Adverts in our sample ran a median of 31 days before disappearing. That is your real window, and it is measured in weeks.
Finding 3
37x
more adverts posted on a Tuesday than a Sunday
Across 13 days of hourly tracking we logged 413 adverts posted on a Tuesday, 354 on a Monday, 222 on a Friday, 22 on a Saturday and 11 on a Sunday. Posting runs office hours, 09:00 to 17:00, with a spike at 16:00 as recruiters clear their desks.
Now think about when people actually job hunt. Sunday evening, after the dread sets in. The single emptiest window in the week. If you only get one search session, make it Tuesday morning, and you will be reading a board that has just been restocked.
Finding 4
37 vs 1
applicants on a receptionist advert against a nursing advert
On fresh adverts, deduplicated, the median receptionist job had 37 applicants. Administrator 23, warehouse operative 20, retail assistant 16. At the other end: care worker 2, healthcare assistant 2, teacher 2, nurse 1.
The jobs people pick as the sensible fallback are the most contested things on the board. The jobs everybody describes as impossible to fill are, from the applicant's side, close to uncontested. If you are qualified for one of the short queues and applying to the long ones anyway, the maths is not on your side.
Finding 5
91.5% / 4.6%
of adverts demand experience, and say how much
In a clean set of 1,090 adverts, 997 mentioned experience. Fifty of them said how many years. Four occupations, across 322 adverts, never once put a number on it.
The requirement did not go away, it moved into the shortlisting room where you cannot see it. Practically, that means the "3 years required" wall you imagine is mostly imaginary, and the honest move is to apply and let them decide. It also means "experienced" in an advert is a mood, not a threshold.
Finding 6
2.6%
of 5,012 adverts named an applicant tracking system
An entire industry sells the promise of beating the robot. We went looking for the robot. Across 5,012 adverts covering 24 occupations, 130 named a system such as Workday, Taleo, Oleeo, TRAC or NHS Jobs. That is one in 38.
Applicant tracking systems are real and big employers do use them, mostly to organise applications rather than to auto-bin them. But if you are contorting your CV for a machine that most adverts never mention, you are optimising for the wrong reader. Write it for the person holding the shortlist. See our honest guide to ATS mistakes for what actually breaks a CV.
Finding 7
0
adverts in 5,975 used the words rockstar, ninja or guru
We went hunting for the clichés everyone mocks. "Rockstar", "ninja" and "guru" appeared zero times. "Go-getter" once. "Self-starter" in one advert in 500. The swaggering 2010s advert is gone.
What replaced it is softer and much more common. "Flexible" appears in 28% of adverts, "passionate" in 18%, "fast-paced" in 14%. And "fast-paced" is doing something odd: 54% of retail adverts use it, against 4% of waitressing adverts and 1% of HGV driving. It is not a description of the work. It is a warning about the staffing.
Finding 8
51%
of annual salaries leave you 10% of room or less
From 1,600 adverts across 16 roles: a quarter named no salary at all. Of those that gave an annual figure, 30% quoted a single flat number where the minimum and maximum were identical. Of the rest, most ranges were tight, a median band of about £5,000, roughly 15% from bottom to top.
Put the flat figures and the narrow bands together and more than half of advertised annual salaries offer a candidate ten per cent of movement or less. The single fixed number clusters in the lowest-paid work: 63% of retail adverts, 60% of customer service. Software developer sat at 12%. Where the employer expects a fight for the hire, the range reappears.
Finding 9
1%
of everyday UK adverts mention remote work at all
In 1,807 ordinary adverts, care, retail, warehouse, admin, nursing, teaching, 18 mentioned remote working. Hybrid did better at 74. For most of the UK labour market, the remote work debate never happened.
Even where you would expect it, it thins out fast. We pulled 1,208 adverts for the ten job titles that dominate "highest-paying remote jobs" listicles and cleaned them to 277 real ones. Fully remote: 5.8%. And the roles that do advertise remote carry the longest queues, a median of 34 applications against 13 for adverts that mention neither remote nor hybrid.
Finding 10
91
times one agency posted the same advert in a single month
A single education agency, Academics, accounted for 261 of the adverts in our July pull, spread across 111 locations. Reeson Education posted the same "Teaching Assistant" advert 91 times. Aldi ran two job titles across 43 towns. 39% of everything in that sample came from agencies rather than the employer doing the hiring.
A job board is not a list of jobs, it is a list of adverts, and those are different things. That thousand-result search is smaller than it looks. It also explains the eternal frustration of applying to what appears to be four different roles and hearing back from the same recruiter about none of them.
What we would actually do with this
Stop racing the clock and start picking the queue. The gap between a 37-applicant advert and a 1-applicant advert dwarfs anything you can gain by being fast, by stuffing keywords, or by rewriting your personal statement for the ninth time. Search Tuesday morning. Skip the adverts that look easy, because everyone else found them too. Apply to the short queues you are actually qualified for, even when the job title feels like a step sideways.
Then tailor properly, because you have more time than you think. The median advert sits there for a month collecting a handful of applications. Nothing about that rewards panic.
How we counted
Two systems. The first is a hand-read corpus of 5,967 adverts collected between May and July 2026 from NHS Jobs, the DWP Find a Job service and Indeed, covering 33 occupations, each one categorised by keyword and requirement. The second is the Reed API: 9,324 unique adverts, of which 5,704 were tracked hourly for 13 days in July 2026, giving 168 snapshots and a real view of when adverts appear and when applications land.
Three cleaning rules run through everything, and they matter more than the headline numbers. Only adverts posted in the last 30 days count towards competition, because job boards carry evergreen listings some of which date back years. Near-duplicates are collapsed, because one employer posting the same job in 40 towns is not 40 jobs. And occupation searches are filtered by hand, because 49.3% of results for "nurse" on one board turned out to be nursery nurses, which is a different profession entirely.
Sample sizes vary by finding and are stated with each one. A few of these come from a single month, so read them as a snapshot of mid-2026 rather than a permanent law. We publish the numbers we have, including the ones that made our own advice look wrong.
Frequently asked questions
How many job adverts did you analyse?▾
15,291 unique UK job adverts. 5,967 were pulled by hand from NHS Jobs, the DWP Find a Job service and Indeed across 33 occupations between May and July 2026. The other 9,324 came from the Reed API, including 5,704 adverts we tracked hour by hour for 13 days to watch applications land in real time.
Is it true that you should apply within the first hour of a job being posted?▾
Our data says no. We tracked 1,003 adverts from the hour they appeared. The median advert gained zero applications in its first three hours, one by six hours, three by 24 hours and seven after four days. The queue you are racing does not exist yet on day one. A tailored application sent on day two beats a rushed one sent in the first hour.
Which UK jobs have the least competition?▾
On fresh adverts, nursing had a median of 1 applicant, healthcare assistant 2, teaching 2 and care work 2. Receptionist roles had 37 and administrator 23. The jobs people treat as the safe fallback are the most crowded ones on the board.
Do applicant tracking systems really reject most CVs?▾
Only 2.6% of 5,012 UK adverts named an applicant tracking system at all. The systems exist and large employers use them, but the industry that sells "beat the ATS" advice is describing a screen most UK adverts never mention. Write for the human reading the shortlist.
What day are most UK jobs posted?▾
Tuesday. Across 13 days of hourly tracking we logged 413 new adverts posted on a Tuesday against 11 on a Sunday. Posting runs from 09:00 to 17:00 and peaks around 16:00. Most people job hunt on a Sunday evening, which is the emptiest moment of the week.