We read the full text of 1,090 live UK job adverts and counted how often they say how much experience you need. Almost all of them, 91.5%, mention experience. Only 4.6% put a number on it.
That gap is worth sitting with, because the number you cannot see is the one you are probably ruling yourself out against.
Four occupations never said it once
The adverts span thirteen occupations, from care work and cleaning through to administration, nursing and teaching. Across retail assistant, cleaner, graduate and support worker roles, 322 adverts between them, the number that specified a length of experience was zero.
Adverts stating a number of years of experience
| Keyword | state years |
|---|---|
| Nurse | 11.7% |
| Care worker | 10.3% |
| Healthcare assistant | 8.1% |
| Warehouse operative | 6% |
| Customer service | 6% |
| Receptionist | 5.9% |
| Administrator | 5.6% |
| Teaching assistant | 1.6% |
| Teacher | 1.2% |
| Retail assistant, cleaner, graduate, support worker | 0% |
What adverts do instead is describe a feeling about the right person. Experience in a similar environment. A proven track record. Experience desirable. All of that reads like a requirement without ever being one you can measure yourself against.
Why this is the opposite of what you have been told
Careers advice trains people to read an advert as a checklist and to disqualify themselves against it. Much of that advice arrives from the United States, where adverts genuinely are written as lists of years: three to five in a similar role, two with a named system.
British adverts mostly are not written that way. The requirement has not disappeared, though. It has moved out of the advert and into the shortlisting conversation, where you cannot read it.
So the practical effect of a vague advert is not that the bar is lower. It is that you are guessing at the bar, and cautious people guess high.
The vaguest adverts draw the biggest piles
Because Reed publishes how many applications each advert has received, we could test whether vagueness widens the field. It does not appear to. If anything it runs the other way.
Median applications per advert, by occupation
| Keyword | median |
|---|---|
| Receptionist | 37 applicants |
| Administrator | 23 applicants |
| Warehouse operative | 20 applicants |
| Retail assistant | 16 applicants |
| Cleaner | 7 applicants |
| Customer service | 5 applicants |
| Graduate | 3 applicants |
| Care worker | 2 applicants |
| Teacher | 2 applicants |
| Nurse | 1 applicants |
Care work is one of the more specific occupations about experience and carries a median queue of two applicants. Receptionist roles rarely state a number, never once said experience was unnecessary, and carry a median of 37. Nursing is the most specific of all and has the shortest queue in the country at one.
Vagueness is not attracting a wider field of good candidates. It is attracting a larger pile of guesses. Which queue you join matters far more than how the requirements were worded, as our competition gap research sets out in full.
The same silence covers working patterns
We checked how often adverts mention remote or hybrid working. Across roles where a desk exists, so home working is at least physically possible, 10.3% mentioned it. Everywhere else it was 4.3%.
The split inside the desk roles is the interesting part. Customer service adverts mentioned flexible arrangements 19.7% of the time and administrator adverts 16.8%. Receptionist adverts managed 2.5%. Some of that is real, since a receptionist is usually needed at a desk. But when an advert says nothing, most readers assume the strictest possible answer.
What to do with this
Three habits follow from the data.
When an advert gives no number, treat it as an invitation rather than a wall. Only 2.6% of adverts in our sample explicitly said experience was not necessary, so waiting for permission to apply means waiting for something that almost never appears in writing.
Read the requirements section first and count what is actually specific. Named qualifications, a licence, a registration number: those are real thresholds. Adjectives are not. If the only firm requirement is a driving licence and you have one, you meet the requirements.
Then spend your effort on the queue rather than the wording. An application to a role with two other candidates is worth many applications to one with thirty-seven, and the advert wording tells you almost nothing about which is which.
How we did this
We collected 1,807 live UK job adverts from the Reed jobs API on 17 July 2026 across thirteen occupations, then cleaned the set down to 1,090. We kept only adverts posted within the previous 30 days, because older adverts accumulate applications through age alone. We removed near-duplicates, which is a real problem in job data: 18.2% of the raw set were repeats, and one supermarket cleaning advert appeared 40 times across different locations with identical text. We also removed nursery nurse adverts from the nursing set, since 49.3% of results for "nurse" were a different occupation requiring no NMC registration.
Counts of stated experience use explicit numbers of years in either word order. We deliberately excluded phrases like "full training will be given", because reading the surrounding text shows these nearly always refer to safeguarding or systems training inside a role that still expects prior experience.
These figures describe what adverts say at one moment in time. They are not a measurement of how any of this has changed. More of our work is at Sausage Dog research.