Hiring advice for employers

How to write a job advert UK candidates respond to: the title, the salary, must-haves versus nice-to-haves, wording that stays lawful, and what advertising a role should cost.

A practical process for shortlisting candidates quickly and defensibly, plus what UK employers must do on right to work checks, DBS checks and references before someone starts.

How to interview candidates without a HR department: structuring the questions, scoring fairly, the questions you must not ask, and turning a good interview into an accepted offer.

The cost of hiring an employee in the UK, broken into three numbers you can calculate yourself: advertising, agency fees and what the vacancy costs you every week it stays open.

A job advert getting no applications almost always has one of five faults: hidden pay, an unsearchable title, a vague location, excessive length or a painful apply process. Here is how to fix each one.

How to write the salary in job adverts so it attracts the right candidates: real ranges, what moves someone up the band, the whole package, and why competitive costs you applications.

Recruitment agency fees explained for small UK employers: contingency and retained percentages, rebate periods, temp charge rates, transfer fees, and when an agency is genuinely worth paying.

How a small employer can measure cost per hire and time to hire using a single spreadsheet, what to include, what to ignore, and how to use the numbers to decide where to spend next.

Job advert titles decide whether anyone ever sees your vacancy. How to pick the term candidates search for, the one qualifier worth adding, why internal grades fail, and the wording to avoid.

How long should a job advert run in the UK, what to expect in the first week, a week two checklist for a quiet vacancy, and when to refresh the advert rather than start again.

A twenty minute a day system for screening job applications: triage, a phone screen script, staying fair under time pressure, and what to keep on file when you have no HR team.

Practical employer branding for small UK employers: the four free things candidates actually check, how to handle reviews, why consistency in adverts matters, and how to tell your careers story.

Why employers keep losing candidates at offer stage, from slow decisions and lowball offers to counter offers and the silence during a notice period, and the steps that stop it happening.

You have never heard of us, we are smaller than the national boards, and you have been burned before. Nine real objections to advertising with a new UK job board, answered without spin, including the ones we cannot fully answer yet.

Treating candidates and employers decently is usually described as a nice-to-have. In hiring it is the cheaper option, and here is the arithmetic that shows why.