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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.
We read 15,291 UK job adverts. Ten findings that change how you should apply.
One Aldi cleaning job drew 1,461 applications. In the same month, 199 adverts drew nobody. Three months of counting: 15,291 adverts, 64,962 applications, 168 hourly snapshots. Applying within the hour is a myth, Tuesday beats Sunday 37 to 1, and 62% of all applications land on 10% of adverts.
An AI engineer advert gets 61 applications. An operations manager advert gets 7.
We counted the applications on 277 live UK adverts for the ten job titles sold as high-paying remote work. The role everyone calls a skills shortage is the most contested one on the list, and what predicts the queue is not pay or seniority. It is whether you can do the job from your kitchen.
We read 1,090 UK job adverts. Only 1 in 22 said how much experience you need.
91.5% of UK job adverts mention experience. Just 4.6% say how much. In four occupations, across 322 adverts, not one put a number on it. The requirement has not gone away, it has moved somewhere you cannot see it.
The longer a UK job advert gets, the less of it is about the job
The median UK job advert is 408 words. We opened up 505 of them and counted what the words are spent on. As adverts get longer the perks section grows 5.2 times over while the requirements section barely moves, and in the longest adverts benefits is the single biggest thing on the page.
1 in 5 UK job adverts asks you to be five different people
We read 5,977 live UK job adverts and counted the personality traits each one asks for. One in five wants five or more at once, and the most demanding asked for eleven. The traits employers ask for most, and what to do about it.