How long a job advertisement actually stays open

Across 99 employers, 128,940 postings and 67,700 confirmed removals, the median employer loses a quarter of its live postings within 8 days, half within 25 and three quarters within 50. Those are Kaplan-Meier estimates, so postings still open at the end of the study are counted as still open rather than quietly dropped.

The spread between employers is the more useful half of the result. The middle half of employers lose half their postings somewhere between 18 and 34 days, but the full observed range runs from 2 days to 82. An employer’s own hiring rhythm moves this figure more than the seniority or the field of the role does.

The first reading, on 30 August 2026, covered 54 employers and 55,942 postings over six weeks: on the median employer a quarter were gone in 7 days, half in 22 and three quarters in 48.

The second, on 30 September 2026, covers 99 employers and 128,940 postings over every night since July: 8, 25 and 50 days. With almost twice the employers and more than twice the postings, the median half-life moved by 3 days, which suggests the figure is stable rather than an accident of the first sample.

We re-measure each quarter with the same method and keep every reading here. The per-employer figures behind the latest one are in the CSV below, without employer names: a single board's figure is the one most exposed to an artefact of our own reading, and publishing it under a company's name would state it as a fact about the company.

In the first reading we computed the same number the ordinary way first, and it came out at 50 days rather than 22. The difference is one correction, and it applies to any study that starts watching a job board partway through its life.

If you begin counting today, the postings already on the board are the ones that survived long enough to still be there. Short-lived postings from last month are invisible to you, so the sample is selected for longevity. The fix is standard — each posting joins the analysis at the age it had when it was first seen, rather than at day zero — and here it more than halved the answer.

This matters when comparing figures. A shelf-life number quoted without saying how survivors and late arrivals were handled is not comparable with this one, and is more likely to be too long than too short.

Every night we read entire career boards — not search results — for a set of employers on Workday, SmartRecruiters and Ashby. Reading a board in full is what makes the measurement possible: when a posting is no longer on the board, the employer has taken it down. A keyword search cannot support that inference, because a posting can be missing simply because the search did not match it.

A posting’s age is measured from the date the employer’s own system reports for it, not from the date we first saw it. A posting counts as removed only after it has been absent from two consecutive full reads, because a single missed night can be a throttled server rather than a withdrawn advert.

The sample is 99 large employers whose boards we read for our own members, on Workday, SmartRecruiters and Ashby. It is evidence about how those employers behave. It is not a random sample of job advertisements, and it should not be quoted as one.

A removed posting is not the same as a filled role. Employers withdraw advertisements for many reasons: the requisition is filled, the search is paused, the posting is rewritten and republished, or the board is tidied. What is measured here is how long the advertisement is visible to a candidate, which is the thing a job seeker can actually act on.

Two large sources were deliberately left out. One reports a last-modified date rather than a publication date, so an employer editing a posting would have looked like an employer replacing it. The other is dominated by a single aggregator that rotates its listings on a weekly cycle, which would have published one company’s product decision as a fact about the labour market.

The practical reading is that the first week carries most of the risk. On a typical board a quarter of what you can see today will be gone within it, and on the fastest quarter of employers that happens in under a week for half the postings.

That argues for reviewing new postings on a short cycle rather than saving a long list for the weekend, and for spending the tailoring effort on fewer, better-matched roles. It does not argue for applying faster to more things: a removed posting you were never suited for cost you nothing.