More posts · Page 2
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.
We watched 1,691 UK job adverts from the hour they appeared. Two thirds never reached 10 applications.
Job boards show you how many people applied. They never show you when. So we photographed every live advert in ten UK occupations once an hour for 13 days. The tenth application takes a median of 28 hours, only a quarter of a queue lands on day one, and 184 of 187 nursing adverts never reached ten applicants at all.
We tested 16 things that supposedly make a job advert competitive. Fourteen did nothing.
We had a good story: adverts saying 'no experience needed' looked less contested. Then we controlled for occupation and advert age and it evaporated. 1,846 fresh UK adverts, 21 occupations, live application counts, and the two features that survived.