What can a job posting's age tell you?
How long it has been listed — and not why. The reason a listing is still up is a question about what an employer intended, and intent is not visible on a careers page. There is no measurement — ours or anyone else’s — that separates a role that has simply proved hard to hire for from any other reason a listing stays live.
What is measurable: 20.8% of the 562,535 postings we track have been listed 90 days or longer, and 1.5% for a year or longer. That is a fact about duration. It is not an estimate of anything else, and the difference between those two sentences is the entire subject of this page.
Why intent isn't measurable from outside
Everything we collect comes from employers’ own public careers pages: what is listed, the date the employer gives for it, and the day it stops appearing. That is enough to say how long something was advertised. It is not enough to say why.
Consider two postings, both listed for eight months. In one, the role was cancelled in month two and nobody took the listing down. In the other, the employer has interviewed eleven people and not found the right one. From a careers page these are byte-for-byte indistinguishable. Any site that tells you which is which has decided rather than measured.
Explanations are sometimes offered for why employers keep listings up. They are things people report, not things we observe, and we don’t attach numbers to them.
What the duration data does support
Two things are worth saying plainly. First, the majority of what we track is recent and unremarkable — the median posting has been up 34 days. Second, there is a persistent tail that does not clear: 116,836 listings at three months or more.
The removal data adds a wrinkle rather than a verdict. Of 984,440 postings we watched come down, 145,178 later reappeared under the same listing. That is a real pattern with several possible causes, and we can distinguish the pattern without being able to distinguish the causes.
What you can do instead of guessing
Check the age. It is the one input available to you before you spend an evening on an application, and unlike a guess about why, it is a fact. Paste any posting below and we’ll tell you how long it has been listed and whether it is still up.
You can also look at the longest-listed postings we track, read what a months-old posting can and can’t tell you, or see how we date and count postings.
Check how long a posting has been listed
Paste the link to a job on the employer’s own careers page to see how long it has been listed, counted from the employer’s posting date. No account needed.
What this doesn’t tell you
Nothing here is an estimate of why postings stay up. We publish how long listings have been up. Reading a duration figure as a measure of intent substitutes a definition for a measurement, and we would be doing that on behalf of employers we name elsewhere on this site.
Long-lived postings have ordinary explanations. Specialist roles with small candidate pools, approvals that sit with someone for months, hiring freezes that arrive after a listing goes up, and listings nobody remembers to remove all look the same from outside.
We name no employer on this page. Not as an example, not as a counter-example. Our company pages publish posting counts and ages and let readers draw their own conclusions; that is a different thing from associating a company with a question about intent.
Related questions
- How long job postings stay listedThe 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 can I tell if a job listing has been reposted?How to check whether a listing came back as a new posting, how often a new one with the same title follows, and what that can't tell you.
- How can I track a company's job listings?Its careers site, its page on Zeltru, following it for new postings, and watching a job you applied to.
- 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 listed.
- Does the date on a job posting mean what it says?Most boards publish the date a listing went up. One publishes the date its record was created, and we mistook the two on our own homepage.
- How can I find when a job was first posted?Where to look for a posting's date, what that date can and can't tell you, and how to check how long it has been up.
- What does it mean when a job posting stays up for months?How long a posting has been listed can be measured. Why it is still up cannot. Here is the duration, and where the line sits.
- How long does the hiring process take?Posting lifespan is a floor on hiring time, not a measure of it. The difference matters and is explained.
- Why is a job still posted after I was rejected?How long listings stay up before they come down, measured, and why a listing that is still up says nothing about your application.
- How long should a job posting stay up?There is no standard. What employers actually do, from the postings we watched come down, without a recommendation.
- Which US states have the most job postings?Active postings by state on employers' own careers sites, with a link to every state's job board.
Or look up a specific employer: browse the companies we track, open the job posting checker on its own page, see the longest-listed postings, or read how these numbers are produced.