What is a posting record's creation date?

The moment a row was created in the employer's applicant tracking system. The listing may go public later, come down, and go back up, all without that date changing.

Does the date on a job posting mean what it says?

Q: Does the date on a job posting mean what it says?

Usually, but not always. Most job boards publish the date a listing was made public. At least one publishes the date the posting record was created inside the employer's hiring system, which can be years earlier — and a record can be reused. We published record-creation dates as posting ages until September 17, 2026, and stopped.

Usually — but we got it wrong ourselves, and the error was the largest number on this site. Until September 17, 2026 our homepage said “4,620 days open” about a listing whose board had never told us when it was published. It had told us when the posting record was created, in 2014, and we read that as a posting date.

Four of the five job boards we read publish a real publication date. One does not. Those listings now carry no age on this site at all.

5 job-board platforms, 574,000+ live listings1,147 employers whose boards we read dailyas of September 17, 2026How we measure

Two different facts wear the same label

A job board hands out a date. Depending on the board, it can mean either of these:

The listing went public on this date. The useful one. It is what “posted 12 days ago” ought to mean, and it is what four of our five platforms publish.
A record was created on this date. The date a row appeared inside the employer's hiring software. The listing may have gone public months later. It may have come down and gone back up several times since. None of that moves the date.

Both are honest values. Both parse. Both look exactly alike in a spreadsheet. Only one of them can be subtracted from today's date to get “days open”.

How we caught it: a listing dated 2016, recruiting for 2028

The clearest single case is an internship listing on Lever, a hiring platform used by a few dozen employers we track. Its record was created on February 24, 2016. Its text asks for candidates “graduating in December 2027 or Spring 2028”.

Nobody kept one internship advert open for ten years. The posting record has been reused — the text rewritten for each intake while the record, and therefore its date, stayed put. Counting from that date produced an age of nearly eleven years for a listing recruiting people who were in primary school when it was created.

Two further checks said the same thing:

A listing whose record dates from 2017 first appeared on a board we had already read about 39 times without seeing it. It was published in September 2026, carrying a 2017 date.
The oldest records on that platform — 2009 to 2014 — all carry a timestamp of exactly midnight, while every record from 2016 onward carries a real time of day. Midnight-only values are the fingerprint of dates imported from an older system, not dates the platform itself recorded. One of them predates the platform's own founding.

The check that separates the two, and what it found

The test costs nothing and we now run it on every date source before we trust it: for listings that appear on a board we have already been reading for a fortnight, how far behind the day it appeared does the board's date sit? A publication date lands on the same day or the next one, because a new listing shows up when it goes up. A record date trails.

Platform	Typical lag	Lag over 30 days	What the date is
Workday	1 day	0.6%	publication date
iCIMS	1 day	0.6%	publication date
Ashby	1 day	0.4%	publication date
Greenhouse	1 day	5.1%	first publication date
Lever	138 days	12.2%	record creation

“Typical lag” is the 90th percentile — nine listings in ten sit at or below it. The middle of every one of these distributions is a single day, which is exactly why checking a handful of listings by hand would never have found this.

One more limit, on a board that does publish a real date

Greenhouse publishes the date a listing was first published, and keeps it when a listing is taken down and put back up. For about 5% of the Greenhouse listings we can check, the age therefore counts from an earlier run rather than from one unbroken stretch on the board. We have not found that pattern on Workday, iCIMS or Ashby, where it affects under 1%.

We are telling you rather than quietly dropping those listings: the date is real, it is the employer's, and it answers a slightly narrower question than the column it sits in.

What we changed

Listings from the platform that publishes record-creation dates no longer carry an age anywhere on this site. They stay listed, with their links, marked as having no posting date.
The ranking of longest-open postings was rebuilt from the boards whose dates are publication dates.
Every new date source now has to pass the check above before a single age is published from it.

The full method, including what each platform supplies, is on our methodology page.

Check a specific posting

What this doesn’t tell you

This page is about what a date field means, not about whether any employer wanted to fill any job. A listing that has been up for a long time may be a hard search, a slow process, a pipeline an employer keeps open on purpose, or an oversight. We cannot see intent and do not report it.

We also cannot see what happened before we started watching a board. For a listing that was already up on the day we arrived, the employer's date is the only evidence we have of how long it has been there.