How long do job postings stay open?

[chalcolithic]

I worked for a company that kept one job posting open for more than 4 years. They've used it to hire more than 100 people, but unless you worked there you wouldn't know.

[jjav]

Not too surprising. I've been at companies where a job posting is hyper-specific to one job description, as soon as I (as a hiring manager) change a single word, HR makes a new job posting and cancels the old one.

And also I've been in places like you describe, where one generic "Software Engineer" job posting is reused to hire many people into many teams, since they're all "Software Engineers" so they just recycle the same posting for everyone.

It varies a lot depending on HR culture.

[Vaslo]

Interesting to hear this data point because everyone would just claim it was a sham job that some companies post to get a feel of the market.

[firesteelrain]

We called them funnel reqs. They were perpetually renewed. It was to get people hired fast.

[JSR_FDED]

Admin & Office : 18 days

Software Dev : 22 days

Retail & Hospitality: 33 days

Would love to understand why.

- few jobs, much supply = can afford to be picky to get the best

- not much difference between applicants = hire first that meets requirements

- switching costs are high = be picky

- high impact on team/culture = be picky

None of these explain the data.

[cornholio]

The only notable data point is the precipitous drop for software engineering from 40-60 days historical averages. lt basically says that tech has become just like the rest of the job market, competitive for applicants and heavily gatekept by insiders, and that will be quite a reckoning for those who never experienced in their professional life a "normal" job seeking process.

The rest are just noise.

[rsynnott]

I would wonder how much of it is _generic_ job postings. Like, unless you're really huge, you probably don't need to constantly hire, say, receptionists, so you'll put up an ad for a receptionist, get a receptionist, remove the ad. If you're moderately big, you may be fairly constantly hiring software engineers, so you put up the ad and leave it there. If you're in retail or hospitality, you are probably constantly hiring people, and many of the roles are quite generic, so you're more likely again to have long-lived ads.

[sp1982]

From what I could see, big retailers have a lot of "evergreen" openings which makes sense as they can have multiple locations and there is a lot of churn. And there are obvious outlier sub-categories like warehouse workers etc which have median times <7d, I didn't break it down in the blog as it's too much data to present. But other than that, I don't have enough search data to draw meaningful conclusions. (say around supply/demand)

[prawn]

I think hospitality can sometimes struggle to get strong candidates at all so might leave positions open longer hoping for better applicants.

[ipnon]

I would not recommend the standard resume -> job portal -> application pipeline to anyone seriously looking for gainful employment. The signal:noise ratio is not in your favor. The current meta for tech jobs is an OSS portfolio, sponsored competitions, self-produced apps, and technical blogposts, roughly in that order. You will get much farther by solving real problems with public visibility.

[DataDynamo]

Some people just want a job, not to package themselves like a sales pitch. It’s about putting bread on the table, not performing personal branding theater — yet the job market has become wildly disproportionate to the reality of the work.

[Etheryte]

People keep parroting this point, but I don't think it actually applies, it's just one of those things that gets reposted a lot on the internet. When we're hiring a candidate, I generally don't go through their Github repos or blogs. I talk to them about what they've worked on and what they've done. Hobby projects can be a good starting point to talk about that, as can be blogs, but really you could start with anything. Most people start with their current day job and that's perfectly fine. You don't have to be coding both inside and outside of working hours do be a good applicant.

[Oras]

You assume hiring managers are looking at OSS?

In my experience, they don’t. They might click to see the GitHub profile but rarely open any repo to check the code.

[ricksunny]

happy to display that I'm clued-out, but what does 'meta' mean in this context? Clearly not the company, nor the general 'meta' modifier to something to describe qualifying criteria about it, like meta data for phone calls. it sounds closer to the term 'alpha' that investors use to describe competitive advantage (and even that term I wonder about).

[skybrian]

If someone does that, how do they then convert it into a job?

[rixed]

Also, be under 40.

[YZF]

Agree the standard resume -> application etc. is tough. It has always been tough even at the best of times.

Most jobs are through friends/network etc. If you really think you're a great fit but lack the network try figuring out who the right person is and reach out directly.

If you're a new grad then internships etc.

[alex43578]

Does this take into account whether the posted is actually using those applications from the end of the window?

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see "Oh, I'm still getting emails about this listing, guess I should close it" when candidates are already in round 2.

[dixie_land]

SDE jobs are usually deliberately kept open to satisfy the H1B/PERM testing. Most big tech company does it so they can hire H1Bs and in turn do day 1 PERM sponsor as an incentive for H1B hires

[Areena_28]

Intriguing: Product/Design roles linger longest (median 30.5 days). Remote-heavy categories like Customer Success at 27.8 days? Great for targeted applications in security ops.