Guardian Jobs to close after three decades as a fixture of charity recruitment
Howard Lake | 4 September 2026 | News
Guardian Jobs, the recruitment platform that grew out of the Guardian’s print classified advertising and became one of the principal channels through which charities recruited fundraisers and other staff, is to close.
The Guardian announced the decision on 2 September, in a statement from Imogen Fox, without giving a specific closure date, and said every currently active advertising campaign or job listing “will be fully delivered.”
The Guardian cited “a fundamental shift in the UK recruitment landscape,” noting that job vacancies nationally are at their lowest level in five years. It thanked those who had worked with Guardian Jobs “over the years” and wished job seekers well in finding their next roles.
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For the charity and fundraising sector, the closure marks the end of a service with an unusually long history. Guardian Jobs traces back to the paper’s Wednesday Society supplement, alongside Tuesday’s Education and Monday’s Media sections, which for decades carried the bulk of the sector’s job advertising in print before the site moved online. Commenting on the announcement, the Guardian’s former public editor David Brindle described it as “the end of an era,” recalling how those classified sections once generated significant revenue that helped fund the paper’s journalism.
Fundraising jobs
Society Guardian’s Wednesday jobs pages were, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, close to the default place a charity would advertise a fundraising vacancy, well before CharityJob, Third Sector Jobs and other specialist boards became established alternatives. Guardian Jobs continued that role into the digital era, positioning itself around candidates and employers with a social purpose focus.
The wider context, a five-year low in UK vacancies, is not exclusive to the charity sector, but it comes at a time when many fundraising teams already report longer time-to-hire and smaller applicant pools than a few years ago. One long-established, trusted advertising channel disappearing narrows the field further, particularly for smaller charities without existing relationships with specialist recruiters.
Charities that currently have live vacancies on Guardian Jobs should check directly with the platform on timing, and should not assume automatic continuity of any linked services, such as candidate databases or saved searches.
Read the Guardian’s full statement on the closure of Guardian Jobs.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.