PLACES WORTH SEARCHING
Where to find the actual vacancies
This site does not list vacancies. It reports what published statistics say about the job market, which is a different thing and a slower one. These are the services that carry the jobs themselves.
Two different things
What this site is
Market intelligence.
- Counts of adverts, requirements and advertised salary, published by ONS
- Every figure carries the month or year it covers
- Months behind the present, because published statistics always are
- About an occupation as a whole, never about one job
What these services are
Actual vacancies.
- Individual jobs, posted by the employer or their agency
- Current, and gone once the role is filled
- You can apply to them
- No statistics, and no claim to represent a market
Public services that carry vacancies
Free to use, run by government or the public sector, and each one covers a particular part of the UK or a particular kind of employer. The coverage is the part worth reading.
Find a Job (opens in a new tab)
Department for Work and Pensions
Vacancies posted by employers across England, Scotland and Wales. Free to use, and no account is needed to search.
Find an apprenticeship (opens in a new tab)
Department for Education
Apprenticeship vacancies in England, searchable by level and by distance from where you live.
Teaching Vacancies (opens in a new tab)
Department for Education
Jobs in state-funded schools in England, teaching and support roles alike. It does not carry independent schools.
NHS Jobs (opens in a new tab)
NHS Business Services Authority
Vacancies at NHS organisations, clinical and non-clinical. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own NHS recruitment services.
Civil Service Jobs (opens in a new tab)
Cabinet Office
Vacancies across UK government departments, agencies and non-departmental public bodies.
myjobscotland (opens in a new tab)
Scottish local government
Vacancies at Scottish councils and other Scottish public bodies.
JobApplyNI (opens in a new tab)
Northern Ireland public sector
Vacancies across the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the wider NI public sector.
Finding a job on GOV.UK (opens in a new tab)
Government Digital Service
The government's own index of job-finding services, including help with CVs, interviews and support while out of work.
Other places worth searching
Named as kinds of place rather than by brand. Recommending one commercial job board over another would be a judgement with nothing behind it, and the category is the useful part anyway.
- Employer career sites
- Large employers advertise on their own site first, and sometimes only there. If you already know who you want to work for, that page is the shortest route to their vacancies.
- Specialist job boards
- A board for one industry usually carries roles a general board never sees, and the people running it know the field.
- Professional bodies
- Membership bodies and institutes often run their own vacancy lists, and they are the ones that carry roles requiring a particular registration or qualification.
- Sector services
- Some sectors have a single service everybody recruits through. Schools, the NHS and the civil service are above; others exist in social care, higher education and charity work.
- Recruitment agencies
- An agency works for the employer paying it, which is worth knowing rather than avoiding. They see roles before they are advertised, and some are never advertised at all.
What these links are, and are not
Nobody paid to be on this page. There is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement and no referral fee behind any of these links, and if that ever changes it will be said on the link itself.
None of these services is a source of anything on this site. The figures here come from published statistics, and where they come from is set out in full.
Services move and close. If one of these links is wrong, the service's own name searched on GOV.UK will usually find where it went.