Last updated: · Dataset: 1,349 live UK job adverts, July 2026
Forty minutes in, the panel closes their folder and asks whether you have any questions. Most advice for this moment is about performance. Ask something strategic, sound like a consultant, prove you did your homework. We came at it from the other end. We read 1,349 live UK job adverts and counted the things they never say, because those are the facts you are still missing when the folder closes.
The gaps are much wider than we expected. 98% of adverts never say who you would report to. 41% never state how many hours a week the job is. 60% never mention a shift, a rota or a start time.
You are not short of insight about their five-year strategy. You are short of knowing what time you start.
What the advert did not tell you
Here is the full set of gaps, as a share of the 1,349 adverts. Some of these are reasonable omissions. Together they describe how much of the job is still unknown to you at the point somebody asks whether you have questions.
- 98% never say who you would report to.
- 98% never describe the interview process or its stages.
- 97% never mention the size of the team.
- 97% never mention a probation period.
- 60% never mention a shift pattern, rota or start time.
- 41% never state the weekly hours.
- 23% call the pay competitive without giving a number.
- 17% give no pay figure at all.
The hours gap is worst exactly where hours matter most. 69% of customer service adverts and 54% of warehouse adverts never said how many hours a week the job runs to. The median advert is 2,686 characters, so this is not a space problem. It is a habit.
The three questions worth your two minutes
You will get a few minutes, not twenty. Any list of a dozen questions is written to be read rather than used. These are ranked by how much you stand to lose if you do not ask.
1. What do the hours actually look like in a normal week? Not the contracted hours, the real ones. Which days, which shifts, how the rota is set and how far ahead you see it. This is the question that decides whether you can do the job at all, and four in ten adverts leave you guessing. There is a strand of interview advice telling you to save this for after the offer. That advice was written for salaried office roles, and following it in shift work is how people accept jobs they then have to resign from in week three.
2. Who would I report to, and how long have they been in post? Almost nothing in this dataset was more consistently missing. Your manager is the single largest factor in whether the next two years are any good, and 98% of adverts do not name the role, never mind the person. The second half of the question is the useful half. A manager three months into the job is a different proposition to one who has run the team for six years.
3. Is this one job, or is the employer hiring continuously? 21% of the adverts we read were one of several identical posts by the same employer, in the same town, inside 30 days. One education agency had posted the same London teaching assistant advert 34 times. Separately, 39.2% of adverts in this collection came from recruitment agencies rather than the employer, which reaches 78% of the teaching assistant adverts we read. If you are sitting with an agency, ask who employs you, who pays you, and whether this is a named vacancy or a pipeline. The answers change your holiday, your pay date and who you call when something goes wrong.
If the conversation is still going
Ask for the pay band if the advert did not give one, because a quarter of them did not. Ask what the next stage is and when you will hear, since 98% of adverts never set out the process. And if the advert called the job fast-paced, ask what that means here. That phrase appears in 54% of UK retail adverts and 4% of waitressing adverts, which tells you it tracks the habits of whoever wrote the advert rather than the actual pace of the work.
The question about what happened to the person before you is a good one and it is usually answered straight. Just hold your conclusion loosely. A vacancy that keeps reappearing is as likely to be an agency working a pipeline as a job people flee.
The ones that do not survive a UK interview
A lot of the advice circulating is imported from American corporate hiring and it does not fit most of the jobs people in the UK actually apply for. The question about how a competitor's recent product launch is changing your strategy has nowhere to go in a care home, a primary school or a distribution centre. Asking your future manager to name their biggest frustration so you can fix it in 30 days lands as presumptuous when you have not seen the rota yet.
The closing speech is the weakest of them. Telling the panel you are already thinking about a solution to the problem they mentioned reads as scripted, and in the public sector, where the panel is scoring you against a written framework, it earns nothing at all. If you want a strong finish, ask a question you genuinely need answered and then stop talking.
The bold one, honestly rated
"Is there anything about my background that gives you doubts?" is the question everyone shares and few people test. It works when you can handle the answer in real time. It also invites an interviewer to say a doubt out loud, and a doubt spoken in the room tends to get repeated in the debrief afterwards.
If you are confident and the gap is one you have a real answer for, ask it. If you are nervous, or you know the gap is genuine and you have no fix, you are handing them a reason to talk themselves out of you. It is a good question with a real downside, and almost nobody who recommends it mentions the downside.
What we cannot tell you
Advert data shows what employers write. It cannot show what happens in the room, and we have no evidence that asking better questions makes an offer more likely. Every claim in this piece is about information you are missing, not about impressing a panel. If someone tells you a particular closing question raises your hit rate, ask them where the number came from.
There is also a limit worth naming in the other direction. Some of these silences are fine. A three-person business is not hiding the team size, it simply never occurred to them to write it down, and an employer who does not name your manager in the advert is not concealing anything. The gap is real either way. You still walk into the interview not knowing.
Methodology and limitations
1,349 unique live UK job adverts collected through the Reed API in July 2026, across 13 occupations: care worker, support worker, healthcare assistant, nurse, teacher, teaching assistant, warehouse operative, customer service, receptionist, administrator, retail assistant, cleaner and graduate roles. Deduplicated by advert ID and filtered to those posted within 30 days of collection.
Each gap is a case-insensitive pattern match against the full advert text. An advert counts as stating hours if it gives a number of hours, hours per week, or full-time or part-time status anywhere in the body. Shift coverage counts any mention of a shift, rota, rostering, clock time, earlies, lates or nights. Reporting line counts any form of reporting to, line manager or you will report. Repeated adverts are those sharing an identical job title, employer and location with at least one other advert in the window.
Limits. One job board, one month, entry-level occupations chosen for volume rather than at random. Pattern matching undercounts anything phrased unusually, so treat every figure here as a floor rather than a ceiling. The 39.2% agency share and the fast-paced figures come from our earlier published analyses of the same and larger samples, linked above, rather than being recomputed here. Nothing in this piece measures interview outcomes, because advert data cannot see them.
