How we research, write and correct

Who writes this

Sausage Dog is one person. Anthony, a UK jobseeker turned founder, writes, edits and checks everything published here, from the role guides to the research. There is no content team and no agency. You can read why he started it on the About page.

Where the numbers come from

Our research reads UK job adverts, not surveys. The adverts come from public sources: DWP's Find a Job service until it closed in June 2026, NHS Jobs, and the Reed jobs API. Smaller studies, usually 100 to 300 adverts, are read and counted by hand. Larger ones run to thousands of adverts and are counted by script, using phrase lists we publish in the method notes. Some studies follow the same adverts for weeks, recording each one from the hour it appeared.

Each piece states its sample size, its source, the dates the adverts were collected and how they were counted. A figure without those is a mistake, and we would like to hear about it. The headline numbers are collected on one page, UK job application statistics, and every study is listed under research.

What we never do

• Reproduce advert text. We publish counts and percentages, never the adverts themselves.
• Mix figures from different job boards into one number. Boards attract different employers, so their numbers are not interchangeable.
• Use the CVs people upload to Sausage Dog in our research, or to train AI models. The privacy policy sets out what we do with them.
• Quote a figure we cannot trace to one of our datasets or a named source.

How we use AI

The CV tool uses AI. When you tailor a CV, Anthropic's Claude rewrites your wording against the advert, and the tool keeps your real employers, dates and qualifications. Interview practice uses OpenAI's speech models to transcribe your answers and read questions aloud.

AI also helps behind the scenes, with counting and first drafts. It does not decide what we publish. Anthony checks each figure against the data, reads every draft aloud and changes anything he would not say himself. We will never claim our writing, or your CV, is undetectable by AI checkers. Those tools disagree with each other too often for a score to mean much.

When the data cannot settle it

A few hundred adverts cannot speak for every employer in the UK, and we say so when a sample is small. Where a finding cuts against what we expected, or another study disagrees with ours, we report that as well. Some questions stay open. Adverts show what employers ask for, not who they hire, and a survey of hiring managers would answer things that ours cannot. We do not run one.

Corrections

If you think something here is wrong, email hello@sausagedog.io with the page and the line. We check it against the data. If it is wrong, we fix it and add a dated note at the end of the page saying what changed and why. Figures are never quietly edited.

Who pays for this

Nobody pays to appear in our research or on our role pages. We use no affiliate links and publish no sponsored posts. Sausage Dog makes its money from one product, Premium, at £9.99 a month. The research is free to read and free to cite.