jobs.nhs.uk

Readiness by lane

Green: jobs.nhs.uk. Thin bar: Job Portals, HR & Recruitment peer median.

Priority fixes for jobs.nhs.uk

Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.

1. Priority 1 · Enable

   robots.txt published

   Observed: No robots.txt file was returned at the site root.

   Why it matters: robots.txt is where crawlers look first for crawl rules and sitemap locations. Without it, they assume everything is open.

   What to do: Publish /robots.txt with any crawl rules you need and a Sitemap: line pointing to your XML sitemap.

   91% of Job Portals, HR & Recruitment peers do this. Limit: Only the standard location was requested, once, at the time of the check.

   Guide: Robots.txt Guide: Control Crawling Without Hiding Mistakes

2. Priority 2 · Enable

   XML sitemap discoverable

   Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.

   What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.

   77% of Job Portals, HR & Recruitment peers do this.

   Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 180 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   What to do: Send Strict-Transport-Security on HTTPS responses. Start with a short max-age (for example 300 seconds), confirm every subdomain works over HTTPS, then raise it in steps to 31536000. Add includeSubDomains only when all subdomains are HTTPS. HSTS preload is optional and hard to undo; hstspreload.org itself does not recommend it by default.

   On Amazon CloudFront: Attach a response headers policy with Strict-Transport-Security to each distribution.

   36% of Job Portals, HR & Recruitment peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: No DMARC record was found at _dmarc.jobs.nhs.uk.

   What to do: Publish DMARC with p=none and a reporting address first, fix any legitimate senders that fail SPF or DKIM alignment, then move to quarantine and finally reject.

   45% of Job Portals, HR & Recruitment peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

What jobs.nhs.uk already does well

Practices fewer than half of Job Portals, HR & Recruitment peers use.

• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.11% of peers
• Reachable over IPv6IPv6 address published.45% of peers
• Framing restrictedFraming controls present.47% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/

Homepage response

HTTP 200, after 1 redirect

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Amazon, 394-day validity, expiring 2027-03-10

CDN or edge

Amazon CloudFront

DNS operators

4 self-run or other nameserver domains

HSTS

max-age 180 days, includeSubDomains

Homepage HTML

25 KB, br

Images on homepage

0

Limits: homepage only, one location, one moment. Header checks reflect the homepage response; other pages may differ.

Stack and providers

Seen in the homepage response, certificate and DNS. Provider pages compare how their customers configure the same checks.

All 31 checks

Select a gap for the method and fix. How each check works

Compare with other Job Portals, HR & Recruitment sites

• djinni.co55
• inpa.gov.it55
• jobguidehq.com55
• pnet.co.za55
• zhipin.com55

Job Portals, HR & Recruitment readiness benchmark