Recruitment health check — see how you look to the people you want to hire
The recruitment health check is a free assessment of how your business looks to a candidate: whether they can find you at all, what your careers page tells them, how your adverts read, and where your pay sits against the employers hiring the same people nearby. It scores only what it can actually measure, out of 100, and tells you plainly what it could not check.
No account. Nothing to install. The first findings appear before we ask you for anything.
What the check looks at
A hundred points, split the way a candidate actually meets you — in that order.
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30
Can candidates find you
Whether search engines and AI assistants can reach you, read you, and name you when someone asks who is worth working for in your trade and your area.
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25
What they see when they arrive
Your careers page, the roles listed on it, what it says about working for you, and how much effort it takes somebody to apply.
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20
Your adverts
How often a role is re-advertised, how long adverts run, whether they state the pay, and how they read against a rubric we print for you.
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15
Your offer against the market
Your advertised pay against the live local band for the same role, and how many employers nearby are competing for the same people.
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10
What candidates already believe
Your public reviews. We hold no licensed review data, so this is not checked and scores nothing — for you or against you. We would rather leave a hole than fill it with a guess.
Attracting candidates is the hard part now, and it is getting harder
These are not our figures. They come from the CIPD's annual survey of UK employers — the same report we cite for cost per hire elsewhere on this site.
- 64%
of UK organisations that tried to fill a vacancy had difficulty attracting candidates.
- 69%
say competition for well-qualified talent increased over the last year.
- 41%
had a new recruit resign inside their first 12 weeks — the price of somebody joining without a clear picture of what they were joining.
Source: CIPD Resourcing and talent planning report 2024, checked 2026-09-08.
Questions people ask about the check
Is the recruitment health check really free?
Yes. The first set of findings runs straight away and asks you for nothing at all. The remaining part puts questions to four AI assistants to see whether you get named, which is slow and costs us money each time it runs, so we ask for a name and a work email before running that half. That is the whole of the catch.
Why are we not getting applicants?
Usually it is not one thing. The common pattern is that candidates cannot find you, and the ones who do find a page that lists duties rather than reasons, with no pay stated and no obvious way to ask a question. Each of those is measurable from outside your business, which is what this check does.
Do you apply for our jobs to test us?
No. We never submit an application, real or invented. That means we cannot measure how quickly you reply to a candidate, so we report it as something we could not see rather than estimating it. Anything we cannot measure is reported as unchecked and scores nothing either way.
Will this tell me where I rank on Google?
No. We hold no search-ranking data, so we make no claim about your position in Google. We measure whether your pages can be indexed and read at all, and whether AI assistants can reach them — which is the part you control.
What happens to the website you give us?
We crawl a handful of public pages on it, politely and honouring your robots.txt, and read live job advert data for your roles. We store the result so your report has a link. We do not sell it, and we do not add you to a mailing list for running a check.
What is an attraction problem, as opposed to a hiring problem?
A hiring problem is not enough of the right people applying. An attraction problem is the cause underneath it: the people you want either never see you, or see you and are not persuaded. Paying an agency solves the first for one role at a time. Fixing attraction changes every role you advertise afterwards.
Want to go through your results with someone?
We will walk through what we would change first, what it takes, and what it looks like when it is working — and we will look at your careers page with you while we are on. Fifteen minutes, as soon as today or tomorrow.
We crawl a handful of public pages on the address you give us, politely and honouring robots.txt, and read live job advert data. We never apply for your jobs to test you, and we make no claim about your position in Google because we hold no ranking data. Anything we cannot check is reported as unchecked, never counted against you.