Why am I not hearing back from jobs?
55.2% of the 542,271 job postings we track have been listed 30 days or longer, and 20.0% have been listed 90 days or longer. The median has been up 34 days.
That doesn’t explain why any one employer didn’t answer you — we can’t see that, and anyone who says they can is guessing. It does show that a lot of what gets advertised has been sitting there a long time, which is worth knowing before you conclude the problem is your CV.
How much of what's advertised is old
The distribution is lopsided in a way an average would hide. Most postings are recent — 31.9% are between a week and a month old — and then there is a long tail that never goes away. Those two populations behave completely differently, and if you have applied to twenty things you have almost certainly applied to both.
You can see the full breakdown, including which industries run oldest, on how long job postings stay listed.
Silence isn't a signal you can read
The instinct is to treat the posting as a status board: still up means still open, gone means filled. Neither holds. Of 850,271 postings we watched come down between July 24, 2026 and October 25, 2026; no fleet read on August 23, 2026, August 31, 2026; 4 more days not confirmed complete (see Methodology), 11.0% were removed within a week of going up and 44.4% had been up a month or more. Removal happens on wildly different timescales, and we can never see the reason.
More pointedly: 111,054 postings came down and went back up under the same listing during that window. A disappearance isn’t even reliably final.
What's actually worth doing
Check whether the posting is still live and how long it has been — that is a fact, and it is one of the few available to you. Beyond that the honest advice is short: apply to more recent postings where you can see the date, follow up once, and treat no reply as information about a process rather than about you.
How old is the posting you applied to?
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
This is not a cause. An old posting and an unanswered application are two facts, not an explanation. We measure how long listings stay up; we cannot see hiring intent, budget freezes, internal candidates, or how many applications an employer received. A page that tells you why you were ignored is telling you a story.
We see postings, not applicants. No response rates, no time-to-reply, no rejection counts — we hold none of that and will not estimate it.
Age is measured from the best date available. Every figure on this page counts only postings where the employer’s own careers page publishes a posted date. Boards that publish no date are excluded rather than guessed at.
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.
- 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.
- What can a job posting's age tell you?Why a posting is still up is not observable from a careers page. How long it has been up is. What the duration data supports, and what it does not.
- 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.