Job boards show you the vacancies. They do not show you the queue. So we measured it: 1,657 live UK adverts across 12 occupations, and the number of applications each one had actually received.
The gap between occupations is bigger than almost anything else we have found in UK hiring data. More than twenty to one, and it holds after you account for how long each advert had been live.
The queue, measured
Reed publishes how many people have applied to each advert. Take the median advert in each occupation and this is what the queue looks like in July 2026:
Median applications per live advert
| Keyword | applications |
|---|---|
| Warehouse operative | 46 |
| Receptionist | 45 |
| Administrator | 25 |
| Support worker | 15 |
| Retail assistant | 15 |
| Teaching assistant | 12 |
| Cleaner | 11 |
| Customer service | 11 |
| Care worker | 4 |
| Healthcare assistant | 3 |
| Nurse | 2 |
| Teacher | 2 |
Read the two ends of that table together. The jobs most people would call the accessible ones, reception, warehouse, admin, are where the crowd is. The jobs the country is publicly desperate to fill are close to uncontested.
It is not because nursing adverts are newer
The obvious objection: maybe warehouse adverts have just been up longer, collecting applications. They have not. The typical advert in every one of the 12 occupations had been live between one and six weeks, and when we divided each advert's applications by its days online, the gap got wider, not smaller.
Receptionist adverts collect just over 3 applications a day. Warehouse adverts collect about 2.5 a day. Nurse and teacher adverts collect one application every ten days. Same job board, same fortnight, and the queue at one end grows every few hours while the other waits over a week for a single name.
Why the "easy to get" jobs are the hardest to get
There is no mystery in the mechanism, only in how rarely anyone prices it in. A job with no formal entry requirement is open to everyone, so everyone applies: school leavers, graduates, career changers, people returning to work. A job behind a professional registration, a qualification, or an evening-and-weekend rota draws from a pool those barriers have already emptied.
The result is that the advice most job seekers get, "apply for reception or admin to get a foot in the door", points them at the most crowded doorways in the market. Forty-five people are standing in that one. Four are standing in the care doorway next to it.
Care really is the open door
The care numbers deserve their own look, because the sector does something almost nothing else in the dataset does: it says yes to beginners, out loud.
16% of care worker adverts state explicitly that no experience is needed, the highest share of any occupation we measured. Around one in ten mention funded or paid training. Combine that with a median queue of 4 applicants and care work is, by the numbers, the easiest front door in the UK labour market: lowest barrier, shortest queue, employer pays for your training.
If you are considering it, our care worker CV guide covers what those adverts actually screen for (it is availability and settings, not certificates).
What to do with this if you are applying
First, know which market you are in. If you are applying for reception, admin or warehouse roles, you are one of dozens per advert. That is not a reason to give up, it is a reason to stop sending the same CV to all of them. In a 45-applicant queue, the difference between a generic CV and one tailored to the specific advert is the difference between the sift and the shortlist.
Second, apply early. In the crowded occupations the queue grows by 2 to 3 applications every day, so an advert that is a week old already has a long line. Set up alerts, apply in the first day or two, and your CV gets read while the reviewer is still fresh.
Third, if you have any flexibility about direction, look at where the queue is short. Care, healthcare assistant roles and (with the training routes) nursing and teaching are occupations where a decent application is often one of two or three, not one of fifty. The "harder" path can be the far easier one to actually get hired into.
Method
We pulled 1,657 live UK job adverts across 12 occupations from the Reed jobs API on 17 July 2026, taking up to 150 full adverts per occupation, and recorded the application count Reed publishes for each advert. Figures quoted are medians per occupation. Applications-per-day figures divide each advert's application count by the days since it was posted, then take the median. All statistics are aggregates across adverts listed on reed.co.uk; no advert text is reproduced. The same dataset's advert-language findings (the no-experience and funded-training shares) are counted with case-insensitive phrase matching over the full advert descriptions.
