The invisible offer: what 1,300 public sector job ads don't tell candidates

Imagine a property listing with no photographs. Three bedrooms, good location, "competitive price". The house behind this imagined advert might be perfect. It might have a south-facing garden the neighbours envy and sea views from the master bedroom window. But the buyer scrolling at 9pm doesn't know any of that, and perhaps the fictitious sellers wonder why nobody is booking any viewings.

This is, in practice, how a large share of public sector recruitment advertisers are positioning benefits.

In July 2026 we analysed a sample of over 1,300 live public and third sector job adverts, drawn from more than 70 employers, to see what they actually tell candidates about the package behind the salary. Not what employers offer. What they say they offer, in the advert itself, which is the only version of the offer a candidate ever sees when comparing job ads. The short version.. The offer is usually there. It's just invisible.

One in five council adverts says nothing at all

Of 1,064 council adverts in the sample, 21.7% contained no benefits information whatsoever. No leave, no pension, no flexibility, nothing. For charities the silence was deeper still, and before anyone concludes this is simply how recruitment advertising works, every single NHS advert in the same sample carried benefits information.

So thankfully this isn't inevitable, although it deserves to be deemed a "bad habit", and habits can be changed with a lot less effort than, say, a full pay and rewards review.

The pension paradox

I'll admit this one is my favourite finding. We've been making more noise about public sector pensions recently, and the local government pension is one of the most valuable benefits in the British labour market. Employer contributions routinely run at two, three, four times what a typical private sector employer pays in. It is, by some distance, the strongest card in a council's hand.

Although more than half of the sampled council adverts mentioned "pension" as a benefit, almost none went as far as to say what it's worth. In the entire sample, exactly two adverts stated an employer contribution high enough to demonstrate the real value on offer, both from the same council. The rest reached for vague language like "generous".

Generous is not a number. A job seeker comparing a council role against a competing private sector role sees "generous pension" on one side, and a private sector salary £3,000 higher on the other, and makes a perfectly rational decision with hopelessly incomplete information. The council stands to lose a candidate while sitting on a benefit worth thousands a year, unstated.

This is precisely why we recently launched our Public Sector Pension Calculator, to help candidates see the true value of a public sector pension, so often overlooked.

Vague is the house style

The pattern of "vague" repeats. Around a quarter of the adverts sampled mention hybrid working; only 7% of those say how many days. "Hybrid working opportunities" tells a candidate almost nothing to base a decision on.

Annual leave fares a little better: of the adverts to state a number of days, 62% never say whether bank holidays are included, which can mean an eight-day difference between two adverts that look identical.

And some of what does get advertised shouldn't impress anyone. A visible minority of adverts present the legal minimum as a perk. "Statutory sick pay from day one" is the law. "Workplace pension with automatic enrolment" is the law. Dressing the floor as a benefit tells a sharp candidate more than it hides.

One concession to make honestly though… Counting what adverts mention is not the same as measuring what employers provide in reality, and plenty of missing detail lives in candidate packs and external careers pages. But a benefit a candidate has to excavate is a benefit that isn't doing its job at the moment of decision, and most candidates never open the pack.

Meanwhile, over the fence

The private sector adverts sitting alongside our public sector dataset were hardly models of clarity, but they have learned one trick the public sector hasn't: the power of small, vivid, human benefits. Eighty-two adverts from a private sector pool offered staff their birthday off. Among more than 1,300 public sector adverts: zero.

A birthday off costs an employer almost nothing, but it photographs beautifully in an advert.

The one subject nobody is quiet about

There is a curious exception to all this reticence. Seven in ten council adverts talk fluently about inclusion: welcome statements, values, commitments to a workforce that reflects the community. When it comes to diversity, the sector has found its voice, and this is quite rightly something the sector should be proud of.

However, of the council adverts carrying inclusion language, roughly three in ten pair it with nothing a candidate could actually check. No guaranteed interview scheme, no Disability Confident membership, nothing verifiable behind the paragraph.

The best adverts in the sample do it properly. A welcome statement naming specific communities, backed in the same breath by a guaranteed interview for disabled applicants, veterans and care-experienced people. Checkable lines carry more weight with a sceptical candidate than any amount of values prose. Candidates will weigh what you state, and they weigh it more when it can be verified.

Thankfully the fixes can be one-line edits

What makes all this hopeful rather than gloomy is how cheap the fixes are. Few require a better package, a budget line or a committee. State the employer pension contribution as a number. Specify how many days of leave, and whether bank holidays are in or out. Give hybrid working its day count, or for community roles, describe the pattern honestly: who manages the diary, where the work happens. Name the flexibility schemes you actually operate. Delete the sentence about statutory sick pay (and if your advert speaks about inclusion, give the words checkable instruments you'll no doubt have in place already).

Each is a one-line edit to an advert template. Collectively, they could be the difference between a candidate seeing your actual offer and scrolling past it, like the dream house with no photographs.

We've been reading public sector job adverts at Jobs Go Public since 1999, and this year we've started teaching software to read them exactly the way candidates do. The uncomfortable, useful discovery from early sample tests is that both candidate and software may reach the same verdict for the same reason, that they can only value what you clearly state.

So a simple question worth taking back to your next advert. If a candidate reads only the job ad, and nothing else, would they know why they should choose you?

About Jobs Go Public

Jobs Go Public is a specialist job board for UK public sector recruitment. We work with local authorities, schools, housing associations, and other public bodies to connect them with the right candidates. Our recruitment insights are drawn from direct research with public sector job seekers and analysis of hiring activity across our platform: giving employers practical, evidence-based guidance rooted in how public sector candidates actually search and apply for roles.

Last updated: 26th July 2026