Data gathered by Innovantage, a Welsh business intelligence company specialising in the labour market, reveal that although a significant proportion of companies in the UK are prepared to admit to using zero hours contracts, few are publically advertising the fact that this is how workers will be engaged.

Recent surveys by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) revealed, respectively, that somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of employers confirmed that they use zero hours contracts to engage workers. Innovantage however found evidence of little more than one thousand adverts containing the term ‘zero hours’ in the first half of 2013. When considering that the UK comprises of 4.8m private sector employers and tens of thousands of public sector hiring organisations, this certainly indicates a lack of transparency.

Each month, Innovantage tracks the job postings across 150 job boards and over half a million corporate web sites. The resulting database of 80 million advertised opportunities, charted over four years, is the most comprehensive aggregation of the intricate details of UK labour market demand in existence. Data extracted from this database analysing trends in the specified terms of engagement for opportunities advertised in 2011, 2012 and the first half of 2013 points to a significant rise in the number of flexible hours work opportunities – including those stating that the work will be offered on a zero hours contract. It is not under the ‘zero hours’ definition however, that the volume rises are being witnessed:

Innovantage data points to a significant rise in the number of recruitment ads containing the term ‘variable hours’ – up 148 percent 2011 to 2012 with ads in the same time period referring to ‘flexible hours’ up 141 percent . For those engaged in sales and business development and HR, there has been a noticeable increasing trend in the number of opportunities being advertised on a flexible working hours basis. The surge appeared in 2012, where increases of 129 percent and 59 percent were witnessed respectively, suggesting a flexible rather than a fixed need was desired by hirers and/or was being witnessed as being of interest to workers.

By far, the most active sector engaged in the usage of flexible hours working, in terms of both volumes and increasing usage, is health and social care. The exceptionally limited number of vacancies being explicitly advertised as zero hours contract opportunities (just 0.54 percent ) however, contradicts with the increasing evidence in the media that, once in situ, the use of these contracts within the sector if far from an irregular occurrence. Founder of Innovantage, Matthew Dewstowe said: “The data we have captured, set into context of other findings, certainly highlights a likely disconnect between the nature of work companies are advertising in recruitment outlines and what this equates to in actual working practice. The perception and the reality are often quite different.

In the majority of instances, the rise of flexible working hours will be delivering a mutual benefit to hirers and workers alike, but the lack of transparency in this area of recruitment is something which should be monitored.” In terms of how the roles were advertised for the 90 percent of Sports Direct's 23,000 workers who are on zero hours contracts, all roles captured into the Innovantage database were classified as having ‘flexible Hours’ and the casual work that appears to be the greatest cause for concern is accessed through a channel on the Sports Direct website termed ‘part-time roles’. An analysis of the 783,870 part-time roles captured by Innovantage in 2012 and the 391,732 roles in the database in the first half of 2013 may add an interesting dimension to an already intriguing debate.”