Guardian Jobs is closed for business. Was it all about low vacancy numbers?

For anyone who may have missed it, on the 2nd of September 2026 the Guardian confirmed that Guardian Jobs was closing.

They launched one of the UK's first online recruitment platforms in 1996, three years ahead of us, and had been running a recruitment supplement in print for decades before that.

They were of course a competitor of ours, and had been for the whole time I've been at Jobs Go Public and for the fifteen-odd years before I arrived.

For all of our shared years, we have chased a lot of the same vacancies, so perhaps it’s fair to say I’m not a neutral observer. But my honest reaction wasn't the one you'd expect from a competitor. There are people whose jobs went with that announcement, and we're in a market where those jobs aren't easy to replace.

My second reaction was to wonder how it came to this. How does a business that good, with a brand that strong, reach the point where closing is the sensible option? It's probably the same question anyone close to Guardian Jobs asked that morning. There'll be a proper answer eventually. Until then, here are my best guesses.

Their reason was real. It just isn't the whole story

Imogen Fox, the Guardian’s global chief advertising officer, said the UK recruitment landscape had "fundamentally shifted lately with vacancies at their lowest level in five years".

This statement wasn’t corporate cover. It was a statement of fact.

ONS figures for May to July put UK vacancies at around 707,000 (the lowest outside the pandemic since late 2014), while unemployment has climbed beyond 5%.

Officially we’re not in a “recession”. GDP is forecast to grow somewhere between 1% and 1.4%, and on that basis everything is fine. But I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t feel like everything is fine.

Look only a smidge further and the two pictures (it’s fine vs it’s not fine) start to blur.

RSM found that the real economy (the part that actually makes things and delivers services), entered technical recession in the second half of 2025 once public spending is stripped out. Real GDP per person has been falling steadily too. So the economy grows on paper, partly because public spending counts towards GDP, while the part of it that actually employs people shrinks (and if your business lives on vacancies, the distinction doesn't pay anybody's wages).

Reorganisation froze everything, and then it got stranger

I can remember a time in the not-too-distant past when I was confidently told local government reorganisation would be all but settled by now (I can also remember having my doubts). But far from being "settled", on the 7th of September the government withdrew decisions it had already made for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Hampshire and Isle of Wight, and launched a review of everything else it had "decided" in July.

Councils themselves hold very different views on reorganisation, and the Local Government Association tends to navigate this point with care. But its response to the review was anything but measured. Councils had invested scarce public money and countless hours in the programme, people's jobs, lives and wider commitments had been affected, and there was, a spokesperson said, "no excuse for the Government's mishandling of this process".

The line that stayed with me was this one: "Staff, councillors and their families cannot be expected to put their lives on hold while ministers undertake a review which is a mess of their own making."

Surrey remain the outliers, while almost everywhere else is still waiting.

The knock-on effect has left many (not all) councils having to sit on their hands a little, and not because they want to. Nobody signs off a post they might have to delete in eighteen months.

So in turn, the vacancy count falls, but within that falling number hides two opposite problems.

At one end, councils have started to tell us that for most positions advertised, they're drowning in applications. For the more generic roles (the ones that were never hard to fill), applications have gone through the roof.

When the private sector looks precarious (as it does at the moment), a job in the local council starts to look like a very sensible option. A salary that’s marginally lower than median but certain, beats a better one that might not be there in March, and the conditions and associated benefits are probably better too. Perfectly rational behaviour! But the result for (some) hiring managers, is hundreds of applications for one administrative post.

Of course a steadily rising number of those applications will now read identically with most job seekers using AI somewhere/everywhere in their application process. The people paying the highest price for that are the managers doing the shortlisting, wading through pages of ChatGPT generated drivel, looking for a real person.

And then at the ‘hard-to-fill’ end, still nothing. For the (roughly) ten percent of posts our council clients bring to us that are genuinely difficult to fill, they remain that way. There's often nobody coming up behind, or the private sector pays more than a council ever can. It’s also very well known that plenty of experienced people have worked out that agency work pays better and carries less institutional weight than a permanent post (social work).

What’s left is one pile too deep to read, and another pile that remains empty. A smaller market isn't an easier one. It's just a harder market with fewer jobs in it.

And there may be a bigger question to answer sitting underneath all of this, and I’m not sure anyone can answer it just yet. But is AI playing a part in cutting roles from the market? Plenty of employers are now citing AI in layoffs, so perhaps the same tools being used by candidates, filling Hiring Managers’ inboxes with hundreds of applications, might also be thinning out the jobs those same people are applying for.

Did the Guardian feel what we've been feeling?

I would estimate, almost certainly, and probably even harder. Like us, they too were strongest in exactly the sectors taking the biggest hit… public sector, charities, education, social care etc... And taking into account some of what I described above from the view out our window, it’s not a general labour market problem. It’s a specific squeeze on the organisations in a sector least able to spend their way out of it.

If you were one of their advertisers, we've put together some info on what happens to live campaigns and what the alternatives are here - https://www.jobsgopublic.com/guardian-jobs-alternative

But does all that explain the closing?

A vacancy slump squeezes everybody, but does it close a business with a thirty-year head start, a national brand, and an audience most job boards would give a limb for?

My guess (and this is a guess from outside with no sight of their numbers), is that this was less about how good the job board was and more about where the job board sat.

On closer inspection, this had been coming for a long time, and of course hindsight makes us all see much clearer.

In 2011, Guardian Media Group's chief executive put a sharp fall in recruitment advertising down to unprecedented cuts in public sector spending, and a Guardian source said at the time they'd been hit harder than any other national paper by the loss of public sector recruitment ads. Fifteen years on, it feels like the same squeeze (but even squeezier) finished the job.

The Guardian's published 2025/26 annual review covers the journalism, the strategy, the endowment, and gives a full page to what the Guardian offers advertisers. Across all twenty-one pages, Guardian Jobs isn't mentioned once. The closest it gets is a bar on a chart labelled "other revenues", £40m out of £282m, shared with content licensing, events and philanthropic funding.

Looking at the numbers alone, revenue was up, the operating cash outflow had narrowed, the endowment had grown to £1.35bn, and 41% of revenue now comes from outside the UK. By all accounts this was a business doing well, pointing outwardly and pursuing a deliberately global strategy, which had sold the Observer at the start of the same financial year. Unfortunately in this bigger picture, Guardian Jobs was small, domestic, and pointing the other way.

So setting aside whether or not, or for how much longer, Guardian Jobs could remain profitable, I can easily imagine the board simply asking "in a recruitment advertising market where the squeezing hasn't relented for 15 years, is this worth the attention and the space on the balance sheet?".

We don't have that option of course, but it does concentrate the mind.

They saw the problem before most people did

In the same annual review, the chair of the Scott Trust sets out what happened to the media business over the past twenty years. Search and social media took over distribution. Publishers lost control of how readers reached them, and once they lost that, they lost the advertising that came with it.

That is the same thing I have been describing, but in their words, about their own industry. Reach alone gradually stopped being something a publisher owned and could sell.

So their answer: stop selling reach and build direct relationships instead.

1.4 million people now fund more than 70% of Guardian revenue. It worked for their journalism. But there was no equivalent move available for a job board.

So what survives?

This isn't a cat out of the bag. We've known for a long time that reach alone isn't a business any more, so something else has to be.

For Jobs Go Public, our response is to couple understanding with reach. Knowing what a job actually involves, and whether the way you describe, grade and pay it still matches what everyone else is doing, is more important than ever!

Reorganisation may or may not deliver what was promised, but it won't be the last restructure this sector goes through. Whatever it gets called next, somebody will still have to reconcile pay and grading structures from several organisations into one, and get it right.

A tight economy means competing for the hard roles against employers who can simply pay more, so if you can't win on salary you have to win on everything else.

Squeezed budgets mean every recruitment pound has to be defensible. "We advertised in the Guardian" used to be an answer on its own. It isn't now. Neither is "we advertised with Jobs Go Public", and quite rightly too. If we can't tell you exactly what your money did, or what the rest of the market is doing, why would you spend it with us?

That's a question I'll answer properly in the next piece, because it's the thing we've spent the last couple of years building towards and it deserves more than a paragraph here.

Whether or not we get that right, I should say the obvious thing. Losing a competitor in business is supposed to be a good thing, and without the Guardian listed next to us on a media buyer's sheet, we just might get the nod of approval a little more often. But what I'm less comfortable with, is the narrowing.

Public sector and not-for-profit employers only ever had a handful of credible places to advertise purposeful careers, and there's now one fewer. That means less competition on price, perhaps less pressure on the rest of us to do better, and one fewer chance for the person you most want to hire, who has never once considered working for a council, to find an advert for a job that they'd be good at.

On that thought, I think I'd rather still be arguing the point with Guardian Jobs alongside us in the market, than have it settled this way.

Written by Steven Doyle

Steven Doyle is Managing Director of Jobs Go Public. He has worked in recruitment since 2008, and spends most of his time with councils, housing associations, charities and schools, trying to work out why some jobs get filled and others don't.

Last updated: 01/10/2026

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: 01/10/2026