Why am I not hearing back from jobs I apply to?

We can't tell you why a particular employer didn't reply, and no measurement from outside can. What we can show is context: of 524,322 postings we track, 50.5% have been listed 30 days or longer and 19.1% for 90 days or longer. A large share of what is advertised has been advertised for a long time.

Is it normal to hear nothing back at all?

We have no data on employer response rates, so we won't put a number on it. What we can say is that the state of the posting is not a signal: postings routinely stay live for months, and 13.2% of the ones we watched come down were removed within a week.

How old are job postings typically?

The median posting we track has been listed 32 days. A quarter have been up 69 days or longer, and 4.4% have been listed for a year or more.

Why am I not hearing back from jobs?

50.5% of the 524,322 job postings we track have been listed 30 days or longer, and 19.1% have been listed 90 days or longer. The median has been up 32 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.

524,322 live postings1,077 employers we crawl dailyas of September 8, 2026How we measure

How much of what's advertised is old

32 days

Median age of the 524,322 postings we track

19.1%

Listed 90 days or longer (99,913 postings)

4.4%

Listed a year or longer (23,122 postings)

The distribution is lopsided in a way an average would hide. Most postings are recent — 34.3% 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 open.

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 267,708 postings we watched come down between July 24, 2026 and September 8, 2026; no fleet read on August 23, 2026, August 31, 2026; 4 more days not confirmed complete (see Methodology), 13.2% were removed within a week of going up and 37.9% had been up a month or more. Removal happens on wildly different timescales, and we can never see the reason.

More pointedly: 19,136 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?

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.