Agency or employment business, on every advert
The distinction is fundamental to how the sector is regulated and almost invisible on most agency websites. An employment agency introduces a work-seeker to a hirer for permanent engagement; an employment business supplies workers who remain under its own contract, which is how temporary and contract staffing works.
Many firms do both, often from the same website, and regulation 27 requires every advertisement to mention the full name of the agency or employment business "and whether the services it advertises are those of an agency or an employment business".
On a website that means the job template, not the About page. A listing that does not say which capacity you are acting in has not met the requirement, however clearly the rest of the site explains your business.
You cannot advertise a job you do not have
The second requirement is blunter. An agency or employment business may not advertise positions unless it has information about the specific positions to which the advertisement relates, and has the authority of the hirer concerned to find work-seekers for that position.
That is aimed squarely at a practice the industry knows well: posting roles that do not exist, or that existed once, in order to attract applications and build a candidate database. It is common enough that candidates expect it, and it is not permitted.
For a website it has a specific consequence. Listings must come down when they are filled, and a jobs page padded with stale or speculative roles is not simply untidy — it is advertising positions the agency has no authority for. If your board is fed automatically from a tracking system, the expiry behaviour matters as much as the import.
If you state a rate, state the rest
Where an advertisement states rates of pay, the regulation requires it also to state the nature of the work, the location at which the work-seeker would be required to work, and the minimum experience, training or qualifications a work-seeker would need in order to receive those rates.
The practical target is the advert offering "up to £45,000" where the top of the range is reachable only with qualifications the advert never mentions. If you publish the number, you publish what it takes to earn it.
This is one of the rare cases where the compliant advert is also the better-performing one. Salary, location and requirements are the three things every candidate filters on, and an advert carrying all three attracts fewer and better applications.
What this means for the jobs board
- Put the capacity statement in the job template so it appears on every listing automatically, rather than relying on whoever writes the advert.
- Put the full legal name of the agency or employment business in the template too — the trading name alone is not what the regulation asks for.
- Make expiry automatic. A role that closes should leave the board without anybody remembering, because a stale listing is an advert for a position you no longer have authority for.
- If you publish salary, publish the requirements that go with it, in the same fields rather than in prose somebody may omit.
- Render listings as real indexable pages rather than inside a widget. Jobs published with proper structured data can appear in Google’s job results; jobs trapped in a script cannot, and the compliance fields are easier to enforce in a template you control.
That last point is where compliance and commercial interest line up. The jobs board is the part of an agency site generating fresh, specific, high-intent content every week, and most agencies get nothing from it because it lives on somebody else’s domain inside an iframe.
Why this sector is worth the effort
An agency with a properly built, properly compliant jobs board is competing for those from a much better position than one renting a widget.
