Worth Knowing #1 - September 2026
Recruitment media, market insight and a few useful things I’ve spotted.
Every couple of months, I’m going to pull together a few things I’ve spotted across recruitment media and the wider recruitment market that I think are genuinely worth knowing about – changes in the media landscape, useful research, new products and the occasional practical nugget that might help us get a little more from recruitment advertising.
And there probably isn’t a better place to start than what’s happened to Guardian Jobs.
Guardian Jobs: the end of an era
I was genuinely surprised to see Guardian Jobs close.
Not because the recruitment media market hasn’t changed enormously over the years – it has – but because only a couple of months ago I was talking to a contact at the Guardian about whether there might still be an opportunity for one of my education clients.
The audience numbers they were showing me were strong, particularly around their ability to reach large numbers of relevant people in a slightly different way, so at that point it still felt like there were interesting things they could potentially do.
That’s probably why the closure caught me off guard.
When I first started in recruitment media, the Guardian was one of the big names. Recruitment advertising was predominantly print, different days of the week were associated with different sectors, and the recruitment sections could be enormous.
Then came online, and the Guardian moved with that too – online jobs, buttons, banners, articles and all sorts of new ways of reaching candidates.
I even remember somebody at the Guardian talking about pay per application years ago. At the time, the idea was pretty much poo-pooed – that’ll never work.
Look where we are now.
So for me, Guardian Jobs closing is less about looking back nostalgically and more about what it says about how quickly recruitment media continues to change.
A product can still have an audience, still have value in certain sectors and still find itself operating in a market that has shifted around it.
And the timing is interesting too. The Guardian pointed to a recruitment market where vacancies are at their lowest level in five years.
Alexander Chukovski made another interesting point about the closure. When a job board disappears, the audience and the demand it has built up don’t disappear with it.
The candidates who used Guardian Jobs – particularly across charity, public sector, education and media – haven’t suddenly gone anywhere. Neither have the people searching for those kinds of roles. They’ll simply start finding those opportunities somewhere else.
So over the coming months, it will be interesting to see which platforms, publishers and employers pick up that attention. For recruiters, I think it’s another useful reminder not to become too dependent on any one channel, however established it might seem.
Which brings me neatly onto something else I’ve been reading recently – the latest UK recruitment benchmarks from Appcast.
More candidates. Less hiring. And perhaps different measures of success.
Appcast has published its 2026 UK Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report, based on 2025 recruitment advertising data from more than 190 UK employers, 880,000 applications and 13.6 million clicks.
The wider picture probably won’t surprise anyone working in recruitment. The labour market softened through 2025, more than 100,000 payroll jobs disappeared and unemployment rose to 5.2%.
For a bit of context, 5.2% is roughly where UK unemployment stood as the 2008 financial crisis started to bite. It went on to rise above 8%, so we are nowhere near the depths of that downturn – but I think it helps illustrate just how different the hiring market feels now compared with the exceptionally tight candidate market we became used to in recent years.
There are more active candidates competing for fewer vacancies, application rates have increased and recruitment advertising costs have generally fallen or stabilised.
But one of the things I found particularly interesting is that Appcast is starting to look much further down the recruitment funnel – not just at how much a click costs or how many applications a campaign generates, but at how many people are screened, interviewed, offered a role and ultimately hired.
It’s one of the reasons I increasingly think we need to look beyond the headline numbers when assessing recruitment advertising. The difficulty is that we don’t always get to see what happens after the application. We can report on spend, clicks, applications and cost per application, but unless we’re closely involved in a wider recruitment project, we may never know how many of those applicants were shortlisted, interviewed or ultimately hired.
And I completely understand why. Resourcing teams are busy. Their priority is to get the applications in, fill the vacancy and move on to the next one – particularly when there’s always another job waiting. But that feedback is incredibly valuable.
The more we know about what happened after somebody applied, the better we can understand whether the advertising genuinely worked. Ten applications that result in three interviews and a hire may ultimately be far more valuable than 100 applications that go nowhere.
And, importantly, it helps us make better decisions next time – which media to use, how much to spend, what sort of candidate we need to attract and whether we should do anything differently.
So, you may hear me sounding like a broken record over the coming months… “Do you have any other data you can share?”
Think about when you post
One of the smaller findings in the Appcast report caught my attention because it’s incredibly easy to act on. Jobseekers are most active at the beginning of the working week, with Appcast recommending Monday or Tuesday as the priority days for launching new vacancies.
However, I know that Friday is often the day when we’re all trying to clear things from our desks – I do exactly the same myself.
So I completely understand the temptation to get a vacancy signed off, sent over and live before the weekend. But perhaps, if the data tells us applications are stronger at the beginning of the week, there’s nothing wrong with getting the job off your desk on Friday and saying:
The work is still done, it’s off your list, but we may be giving the vacancy a better chance of getting seen and acted on at the right time.
Indeed Premium: is this becoming the new sponsored?
Premium Sponsored Jobs are becoming increasingly familiar, particularly for harder-to-fill or more competitive vacancies.
What I find more interesting is how much the recruitment advertising landscape around them has changed.
Go back 15 years or so and organic visibility could often be enough. Sponsored jobs existed, but plenty of employers could still generate a decent response without paying to push every vacancy.
Over time, as more jobs have been aggregated onto platforms and organic visibility has become harder to rely on, sponsorship has increasingly become part of the normal recruitment advertising mix. For many vacancies now, simply being listed doesn’t necessarily mean being seen. And I can’t help wondering whether Premium is starting to represent the next stage in that evolution.
In some ways, Premium today feels a little like Sponsored Jobs did years ago: an additional layer of visibility and candidate reach that isn’t necessarily required for every vacancy but can make a meaningful difference where the market is competitive, the role is harder to fill or speed matters.
That doesn’t mean every job should automatically be Premium. There are still plenty of vacancies where Standard Sponsored is absolutely the right choice and the additional Premium spend simply isn’t necessary. Equally, there are others where that additional layer can genuinely be worthwhile.
For me, that’s really the point.
It isn’t about Premium being “better” than Standard. It’s about looking at the role, the market, the location and the candidate pool and deciding what level of support that particular vacancy actually needs.
Standard Sponsored Jobs
- Priority in jobseeker search results
- Promoted in jobseeker home-page feeds
- Featured in jobseeker email notifications
- Budget recommendations to help stay in control
Premium Sponsored Jobs
All the benefits of Standard Sponsored Jobs, plus:
- Time-saving AI features
- Invite matched candidates to apply
- ‘Urgently needed’ label to help fill roles faster
- Branded Jobs for greater visibility
- Tech Network reach across relevant industry sites and communities
It doesn’t always mean creating more content
Something else that came up in a recent Indeed meeting really struck a chord with me.
One of the biggest barriers to employer branding isn’t usually a lack of stories or content – it’s finding the time to do something with it.
Most organisations already have plenty to work with. There are colleague stories, videos, social posts, benefits, events, community activity and things happening across the business all the time.
The difficulty is that it often sits in different places.
The brand team might be posting something on LinkedIn. Recruitment might be running social content somewhere else. The careers site says something slightly different again, while Indeed and Glassdoor profiles quietly sit waiting for somebody to have time to update them.
Indeed’s Employer Branding Suite is interesting to me for that reason.
In a recent meeting, Indeed explained that existing content can be repurposed much more easily – even something as straightforward as taking the URL from an existing LinkedIn post and using it to populate content on the Glassdoor profile.
Employer Branding Ads can also extend beyond Indeed and Glassdoor and run across Meta, so the lines between recruitment media, employer branding and social activity are becoming much less defined.
For me, the opportunity isn’t necessarily to create more and more content. It’s to make the content you already have work harder.
And as AI becomes more embedded in recruitment platforms and in the way candidates search, research organisations and consume information, I think having a clear and consistent employer story across different channels is only going to become more important.
Your careers site, jobs, social channels, Indeed and Glassdoor don’t all need identical content.
But they should all feel as though they’re talking about the same organisation.
Sometimes it’s simply about joining the dots and getting everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.
Display Ads
Employer-brand advertising across Indeed, Glassdoor and relevant off-site placements, helping you reach people beyond the job search itself.
Employer Branding Hub
A central place to manage and strengthen your employer presence across Indeed and Glassdoor, including company content, updates, reviews and profile management.
Branded Jobs
Your branding carried through onto job listings, helping candidates connect the vacancy with the employer behind it.
Insights & Analytics
Reporting around brand health, engagement and reputation across Indeed and Glassdoor, so you can see how your employer brand is landing with candidates.
Employer Branding Ads can also extend off-site – including onto Facebook and Instagram.
And a few other things worth knowing
I’ll use this part of each edition to share people, events, webinars or opportunities I’ve come across that I think might genuinely be useful. Not because I’m involved with them or selling them – simply because I’ve spotted them and thought somebody else might benefit too.
Supporting colleagues through health, loss and bereavement
For my northern-based contacts, this one may be worth a look.
I recently met Elaine Morris, founder of Curious Edge, at a networking event and really liked the way she spoke about the work she does around people, leadership and workplace support.
Elaine is helping to promote a fully funded workshop at The Leveson Centre in York on 10 September, aimed at helping managers support colleagues who may be dealing with a long-term health condition, loss or bereavement.
The session is designed to be practical and accessible while also helping to raise awareness of the work of York Against Cancer and York Bereavement Alliance.
Someone else worth knowing: Pearly from Your Menopause Nurse
I also met Pearly Clark Brown recently (what a cracking name!)
Pearly is the co-founder of Your Menopause Nurse, a North Yorkshire-based service providing specialist menopause advice and support, alongside menopause support and training for employers.
But what really stayed with me was Pearly herself. She was genuinely one of the warmest people I’ve met in a long time. You immediately felt completely at ease with her, and her passion for what she does was impossible to miss – she clearly just loves her job.
For employers, menopause support is one of those areas where having knowledgeable, approachable people involved can make such a difference – whether that’s helping managers understand what good support looks like or giving employees somewhere knowledgeable to turn.
Inclusive design in practice – 23 September
Evenbreak is running a free 30-minute webinar looking at what inclusive design actually means in the workplace – and how building flexibility, choice and accessibility into everyday work can help remove barriers before they arise.
If disability inclusion is part of your people agenda, this could be a useful half hour.
That’s probably enough from me for the first one.
If something here has given you food for thought – or you want another pair of eyes on a recruitment campaign, media plan or employer-brand problem – that’s exactly the sort of thing I help with.
