12.9% of UK job adverts have never had a single application. For nursing, it is 43%.

Last updated: 30 September 2026 · Dataset: 11,305 UK job adverts, 10 occupations, tracked daily from arrival since 1 August 2026

12.9% of UK job adverts old enough to have had a fair week's chance have never received a single Reed application. For staff nurse adverts it is 43.5%. For receptionist adverts it is 3.9%.

We have been recording UK job adverts from the hour they appear since 1 August, going back every day to log the application count Reed shows on each one. The panel now holds 11,305 adverts across 10 occupations and 56 daily snapshots. Most of what gets written about job competition looks at the busy end: how many applications the popular adverts attract. This looks at the other end. How many adverts get nothing at all.

An advert sitting at zero applications after a week has not been seen and passed over. Nobody has read it.

The full table

Every occupation we track with enough adverts to say anything useful, sorted by how often its adverts go untouched.

Two clusters, not a smooth curve. Health and care roles sit at 15% or above, four of them well above. Office roles sit under 8%. Nothing in between. That split matches what we found looking at the busy end of the same panel, which is a different measurement landing on the same divide.

The adverts that vanish are worse

Looking only at adverts that have already come down, rather than ones still live and possibly still collecting applications, the picture sharpens. Of 1,099 departed adverts, 36.7% left the board having never received a single application, and the median departed advert had only two. For staff nurse specifically, the median application count at departure is zero.

That is the more troubling number, because a departed advert is a closed loop. It is not possible it goes on to attract someone next week. Whatever hiring happened against it, if any did, happened through some route other than the applications Reed recorded.

The caveat that could undo this

These are Reed application counts only, which means applications submitted through Reed. NHS nursing largely recruits through NHS Jobs and TRAC. A nurse who sees a Reed listing may click through and apply somewhere else entirely, and that application never reaches our figures. The 43.5% is not a claim that four in ten nursing vacancies have no interest. It is a claim that they have no interest arriving through this particular channel.

We lean toward the gap being mostly real rather than entirely a routing artefact, for the same reason as before: occupational therapist sits at 25.3% and does not route through NHS Jobs the way nursing does, and it is still the second-highest health role after dental nurse. If the whole pattern were an NHS Jobs artefact, occupational therapist should look like receptionist. It does not. That is suggestive, not conclusive, and one job board over eight weeks cannot settle it on its own.

What this means if you are job hunting

If you work in an office or admin role, an advert sitting at zero applications is rare and worth moving on quickly, because it will not stay that way. If you work in nursing, care or a related field, zero applications after a week tells you almost nothing about whether you would get the job. It is closer to the default state of the advert than an exception.

The more useful question is not how many people you are competing against, which our earlier work on the competition gap covers, but whether the advert is even being seen by anyone at all. On this evidence, for a wide slice of health and care roles, the honest answer is often no.