Median listing age runs from 12 days on Workday to 101 on Lever. What a company posts with predicts how long an ad stays up better than what it is hiring for.
Every job board tells the same story. The employer writes an ad, a candidate finds it, the role closes, the ad comes down. Our crawl says the middle of that is mostly true and the last part is where it falls apart.
We measure listing age as the time since the source-reported publication date. Across the 5,983,556 postings in the September 2026 edition that carry a publish date, the median is 27 days. Split it by the applicant tracking system an employer posts through, and one number becomes a range:
The spread is not explained by who hires. Lever and Recruitee are not the home of a slower kind of company. They are software, and each piece of software has its own idea of when a posting should stop being shown. The share of postings older than 60 days lands in the same order: Workday 0.0%, Lever 60.47%, Recruitee 62.21%. A platform that never retires an old ad will always look like a market where nobody ever hires.
Workday is the extreme on both ends, and the reason is worth stating plainly. Its postings omit a publication date on 47.76% of records. The 12-day median is measured on the half that did carry a date, and that half is not a random half: an ad with a visible date is more likely to be actively maintained than one without. Read the Workday figure as a floor, not a fact.
Workday is not the only gap. Whether a date is there at all is a property of the source, not of the employer: some platforms publish a date on every record we see, and some expose none at all. That per-source picture decides how far this article carries for any single platform, and it has its own page: Publication dates.
One phrase is worth keeping straight, because the whole article rests on it. "Publication date" means the date the source reports. We carry it through without re-deriving or imputing it, and we do not treat it as the day a vacancy actually opened. So every age figure here is measured on the postings that carry a date, on the sources that supply one.
We can measure age. We cannot see the hiring decision that should end it. So "still listed after 60 days" means the date is old, not that the job is still open. Those are different claims and only one of them is ours to make.
For anyone applying, the useful move is to stop reading age as a statement about the role and start reading it as a statement about the pipeline. An ad that has sat for three months on a platform that never clears its listings tells you nothing about the job. The same age on a platform that does clear them tells you the search is still running, or that the posting was forgotten. You rarely get to know which.
That is an uncomfortable place to leave it, and it is where the data actually stops. The platform decides how long a listing lives. The employer decides very little of it.
→ Hiring platforms · Listing age by country · Publication dates
Want a cut we have not published? A region, an industry, a role family, a time series, one country against another — we can pull it from the same corpus these posts are measured on.
Tell us what you are looking at: [email protected]. We answer either way.
Source & licence. All figures here come from our own crawl of public job postings, measured against the corpus published in the monthly report and its JSON (CC BY 4.0).
Cite as: DeUnemployment, “The shelf life of a job ad comes from the software, not the job”, https://deunemployment.com/blog/the-shelf-life-comes-from-the-software (data as of 2026-09-20).