How long does the hiring process take?
Half the job postings we watched come down had been advertised for 21 days or less, with the middle half running 10 to 42 days.
That is how long the advertisement lasted, which is not the same as how long the hiring took. It is a floor: whatever the employer’s process was, it occupied at least part of that window. We can’t see interviews, approvals or offers — those happen inside systems we have no access to.
What the posting window actually shows
The spread is doing more work here than the midpoint. 13.2% of postings came down within a week of going up, while 7.4% had been advertised for three months or more. If you are trying to calibrate expectations for one role, the range is the honest answer and the median is a summary that hides it.
Why the posting can outlive the decision — and vice versa
Postings come down early when a shortlist fills, when a role is cancelled, or when a listing expires on a schedule the recruiter didn’t choose. Postings stay up late when nobody remembers to remove them, when the employer wants a backup pipeline, or when the process is genuinely still running.
The result is that a removal date is a weak proxy for a decision date, in both directions. It is still the only end-to-end timing signal visible from outside, which is why it is worth publishing with its limits attached rather than not publishing at all.
One more wrinkle: 19,136 postings came down and went back up under the same listing inside our window. For those, the advertised period isn’t even continuous.
What you can check for your own role
Paste the posting below and we’ll tell you how long it has been advertised, measured from the employer’s own posted date. Right now 50.5% of the 524,322 postings we track have been listed 30 days or longer, so a role that has been open a month is unremarkable — a role that has been open since last winter is a different kind of signal.
The wider distribution, including how it varies by industry, is on how long job postings stay open.
How long has this role been advertised?
Sign in and paste a job link to find a current public listing and its employer posting date, when available.
What this doesn’t tell you
Posting lifespan is not time-to-hire. The posting usually goes up before interviewing starts in earnest and often comes down before an offer is signed. The two periods overlap; neither contains the other.
Long processes are under-represented in this figure. We count removals inside our observation window, currently July 24, 2026 to September 8, 2026. A role advertised for eighteen months only enters the count on the day it comes down, so the median leans short.
We have no interview or offer data. No stage counts, no scheduling, no outcomes. Any site publishing “the average process has 4.2 interviews” got that from a survey, not a measurement.
Related questions
- How long do job postings stay up?The full distribution of posting age across every board we crawl, with the industry breakdown.
- How long does it take to hear back after applying?Nobody can measure an employer's reply from outside. What can be measured is how long the posting lasts.
- Why am I not hearing back from jobs?How much of what is listed right now has been listed for a very long time, and what that does and does not explain.
- What does it mean when a job posting is taken down after an interview?How old postings are when they come down, how often they come back, and why removal is not a decision.
- How many applications does it take to get a job?We cannot answer this one, and we say why. What we can show you is the size and staleness of what is open.
- What is a ghost job?The term describes an intention. We can only measure duration — so here is the duration, and where the line sits.
- Do companies post fake jobs?Intent is not observable from a careers page. Duration is. What the duration data supports, and what it does not.
Or look up a specific employer: browse the companies we track, see the longest-open postings, or read how these numbers are produced.