How we measure
Methodology
Zeltru tracks how long job postings stay open on major companies' own career pages. Here's exactly where our numbers come from — and the lines we won't cross.
Where does the “open N days” clock start?
Every posting's age is counted from the date the job board itself reports, whenever the board gives us one:
- Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashbypublish a real posted/created date for every listing. We use it directly — “open 200 days” means the employer posted it 200 days ago.
- Workdayboards don't put a real date in their list, so we read it from each job's own detail page. That gives us a real posted date for about 90% of Workday roles; the rest carry no machine-readable date on the board at all.
We re-check every board daily.
What is the difference between “open N days” and “listed N+ days”?
“Open N days”is counted from the employer's real posted date.
“Listed N+ days” means the board gave us no usable date, so we count from the day we first saw the posting. It's a minimum— the role is at least that old, and probably older. We always label these “listed N+ days,” never “open N days,” so an inferred floor is never mistaken for a confirmed posted date.
What do the headline stats count?
The homepage decay percentages (“still open after 30 / 60 / 90 days”) and the “postings open 90+ days” figures use only board-dated postings— real employer dates. Undated (“listed N+ days”) postings are excluded from these percentages, so they can never be inflated or deflated by our own first-seen clock as roles age.
We also exclude continuous-hiring roles — per-diem/PRN and float pools, talent pools, freelance rosters, all-shifts requisitions, and postings an employer labels evergreen — because they stay open by design rather than going unfilled.
Why do activity trends exclude onboarding?
When we add a company to tracking, its entire current job board appears in our data at once. That's us catching up — not the employer posting a wave of new jobs. We exclude these onboarding-day importsfrom “roles added” and growth numbers, so a day we onboard a hundred companies reports the real organic activity, not a one-time import spike.
What does Zeltru not claim?
A long-open posting isn't proof of anything on its own — roles stay open for many legitimate reasons (backfills, high-volume hiring, slow internal processes). We report counts and durations, dated from each company's own job board and checked daily. Every listing links back to its source so you can verify it.