Job share questions, answered

A job share partner is the other half of one full-time role. Job-sharing is when two people jointly deliver a full-time job — so each works genuinely part-time hours, while the employer, manager, team and clients get a full-time service.

In Sara Allen's words, there is never a day when the role isn't manned, when questions go unanswered or balls get dropped. The magic happens in the handover — the two hours or so a week in which the pair update, share insights, plan and innovate together.

Traditionally people found partners inside their own organisation, or by asking around — which limits you to whoever happens to be nearby. Dovetail exists to widen that: it matches professionals by career area and specialist experience, pay expectations, preferred working week and target work location.

Create a free private profile and you'll see how many compatible professionals are in the network, with anonymous fit headlines. Names and full profiles stay locked until you decide to pay for an introduction — your salary is never shown to anyone.

Continuity is one of the strongest arguments for job-sharing, and it works in your favour here. When one half of the pair is on leave or ill, the other half of the week is already covered — the role never goes quiet.

If your partner moves on, the employer retains a trained half of the role and you become the anchor for the replacement. That is much cheaper than losing a full-time colleague outright: the employer keeps the experience, the client relationships and your knowledge of the role, and recruits only your half. This is exactly how the retention argument works in the business case for job-sharing.

Not when the numbers are laid out. Paying two people to cover one role — including the shared handover time — typically raises the salary paybill by around 10%, which can stay within the budget already benchmarked for the advertised role.

Against that, job-sharers are around 30% more productive like-for-like, so the employer is still ahead. Add the savings from retaining talented staff rather than re-hiring and retraining, and a richer spread of skills than any single candidate could bring, and the case usually writes itself. In smaller organisations the handover hours can even be found for free by shifting a start time by an hour.

Job-sharing has been done in senior, demanding roles in every industry — including Whitehall policy director roles and the boardroom. Sara Allen, Dovetail's founder, ran a dementia think tank in the Civil Service and built her career around making senior job shares work.

Many employers are open to job-sharing once they've thought through the benefits and practicalities. The trick is making the case for your specific role, with data specific to your employer.

Come prepared with a business case: explain what job-sharing is in one line, show the benefits to that employer (diversity goals, continuity, productivity, retention), and explain how you and your partner would make it work — how your skills, approach and experience complement one another.

Dovetail helps here: as a matched pair you already have a readout showing how your skills and experience combine, which you can share with an employer to show that together you offer more than a single employee ever could.

You build a private profile covering your career area, specialist experience and skills; the days you want, could and prefer to work; where you want to work; and your pay expectations. The engine matches pairs whose careers, working weeks and locations genuinely line up.

Salaries are used only for compatibility and are never displayed. When two members are a genuine match, a conversation can open between them — free while Dovetail is in free launch mode, with a small paid credit planned later.