Receptionist adverts drew 26 times more applicants than nursing adverts

Last updated: 3 September 2026 · Dataset: 2,482 UK job adverts, 16 occupations, watched daily from arrival

Across 233 staff nurse adverts watched for a month, not one reached ten Reed applications. The busiest tenth of them carried two. Over the same period the busiest tenth of receptionist adverts carried 53.

We have been recording UK job adverts from the hour they appear since 1 August, going back every day to count the applications on each one. The panel now holds 2,482 adverts across 16 occupations. Every one is watched from arrival, so an advert's age is measured rather than guessed, which turns out to be the whole ballgame: an application count means nothing until you know whether the advert went up this morning or three weeks ago.

The roles with the loudest shortage headlines are the ones nobody is applying to. The quiet office roles are where the queue actually forms.

The full table

Here is every occupation with enough adverts to say anything useful about, sorted by how often its adverts get busy. The last two columns are for adverts more than a week old: the median, and the 90th percentile, which is what the busiest tenth of adverts carry.

Marketing executive is the one that surprised us. It is by far the biggest set here at 584 adverts, it is the role people assume is drowning in graduates, and only 4% of its adverts ever reached ten applications. Volume of vacancies and volume of applicants are different things, and we had been quietly conflating them.

Nobody needs to apply within the hour

There is a piece of folk wisdom that says you must get your application in within the first hour or the employer will never see it. It is everywhere, it makes people frantic, and nothing in this data supports it.

The median UK advert collects one application in its first 24 hours. One. Across all sixteen occupations the first-day median is zero, one or two, and that is the entire range. Even the roles that do fill up take their time about it. Reaching ten applications takes a median of 24 hours for an administrator advert, 71 hours for a receptionist, 116 for a paralegal and 286 for a library assistant, which is close to a fortnight.

Applying early does help. An advert with two applications on it is a better bet than the same advert with twenty, and the arithmetic there is obvious. But the unit is days, not minutes. If you spent an extra forty minutes tailoring your CV to the advert, you did not miss the window. You almost certainly improved your odds more than the delay cost you.

What we got wrong in August

In August we published a first pass at this using 13 days of hourly readings across ten occupations. The headline then was that two thirds of adverts never reach ten applications, and that nursing was the extreme case at 184 of 187.

A month of data has held that up and sharpened it, but it also corrected the framing. We wrote that piece as a story about adverts being less competitive than people fear, which is true on average and hides the interesting part. The average is made of two completely different populations. Office and administrative roles behave one way. Health, care and education roles behave another. Reporting the middle of those two describes nothing that actually exists.

The other correction is about advert age. Our first pass compared adverts without always knowing how old they were, which flatters old adverts and punishes fresh ones. Every figure on this page comes from adverts caught within 24 hours of going live and followed from there.

The caveat that could undo all of this

These are Reed application counts, which means applications submitted through Reed. NHS nursing largely recruits through NHS Jobs and TRAC. A nurse who sees a Reed listing may well click through and apply somewhere else entirely, and that application never reaches our figures.

So we cannot tell you that 233 nursing adverts received almost no applications. We can tell you they received almost none through this channel, while receptionist adverts on the same site in the same month received plenty. Whether the gap is a real shortage or a routing artefact is genuinely open.

We lean toward mostly real, for one reason: care assistant sits at 3% and occupational therapist at 1%, and neither routes through NHS Jobs the way band 5 nursing does. If the whole effect were an NHS Jobs artefact, those two should look like receptionist. They do not. That is suggestive rather than conclusive, and a month of one job board cannot settle it. If you work in NHS or agency recruitment and can see both sides of that routing question, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

What to do with this if you are job hunting

Stop treating every application as though you are one of hundreds. For most of these roles you are one of one, two or eight, and the difference between those numbers changes what a sensible amount of effort looks like.

If you are going for the contested end, receptionist, paralegal, payroll, admin, then tailoring is doing real work for you. There is a stack, someone is going through it, and a CV that visibly answers this advert rather than adverts in general is what gets pulled out. Our earlier work on what actually makes an advert competitive found that most of the things people assume matter do not, so spend the effort on the match rather than on presentation.

If you are going for the quiet end, nursing, care, teaching support, then the queue is not your problem and speed is not your problem. Something else is filtering you, whether that is registration, a DBS check, shift availability or simply applying through the wrong channel. Worth checking whether the employer also lists on NHS Jobs, because on this evidence that is where the applications are going.

What to do with this if you are hiring

If you recruit across a mixed workforce you are probably measuring all of it the same way, with one time-to-fill target and one escalation trigger for a vacancy that has been open too long. You are running two unrelated problems through one process.

For contested roles the problem is triage. A receptionist advert whose busiest version pulls 53 applications does not need more reach. It needs a faster and fairer route through the pile, because every day it stays open adds candidates nobody will read.

For shortage roles reach is the entire problem, and the open advert is doing nothing at all. A nurse vacancy sitting at zero applications after ten days has not been read and turned down by anybody. Nobody has seen it. Escalating it at day 28 because that is when your process escalates things has wasted a month you did not have.

The fix is not expensive. Set the escalation trigger on applications received rather than days elapsed, so a dead advert surfaces on day three instead of day 28.

The striking thing in all of this is not that nursing is unpopular. It is that application volume depends far more on the type of role than most employers assume, and the assumption usually runs backwards. Measuring every vacancy against the same recruitment timeline treats a shortage and an oversubscribed office job as the same problem, when the data says they are opposites. Both of them show up on the same dashboard, in the same colour, as a vacancy that is still open.