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How long do job postings stay open?

24 points

by sp1982

1 day ago

| past

| 6 comments

| corvi.careers

| HN

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chalcolithic

2 hours ago

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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.

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Vaslo

1 hour ago

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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.

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alex43578

39 minutes ago

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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.

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JSR_FDED

2 hours ago

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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.

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cornholio

1 hour ago

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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.

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prawn

43 minutes ago

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

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sp1982

2 hours ago

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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)

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dixie_land

1 hour ago

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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

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umairnadeem123

1 hour ago

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cool dataset. one thing i'd love to see: distribution tails (p50/p90/p99 open days) split by remote vs onsite and by seniority keywords. also how are you handling reposts/refreshes (same role relisted) vs truly new openings? that can skew average open time a lot.

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ipnon

1 hour ago

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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.

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DataDynamo

1 hour ago

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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.

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alex43578

41 minutes ago

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The reality of any matching market is based around first impressions and theater. Dating, college apps, hiring, real estate transactions, etc.

Some people just want to buy or sell a house. FSBO with some cheap cellphone pictures will sell far slower than a staged house with professional photos, MLS listing, and a launch party for local agents.

Do many high schoolers care about volunteer work, taking a second language, etc? No. Is it expected to be a part of their application and essay for a good school? Yes.

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Oras

11 minutes ago

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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.

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Etheryte

45 minutes ago

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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.

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input_sh

15 minutes ago

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I'd go as far as saying it's counter-productive. I have a hobby-level project with actual users earning me some money on the side while requiring very little day-to-day involvement (roughly 2h per week) and there's no quicker way to get my door shut doing interviews than by mentioning it.

There's simply no way to package that at the end of the interview which doesn't make the other side think that I'm gonna steal company's time at best and that I'm only looking for like a temporary gig until it takes off at worst.

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skybrian

1 hour ago

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

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ricksunny

1 hour ago

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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).

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etskinner

1 hour ago

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Meta is short for metagame. In videogames, and even in some sports, there are decisions made above/outside of the typical strategy of the game which players call metagame. For example, drafting players in football is metagaming. Or choosing what pickleball paddle to use is metagame.

An expanded view of that is that there's usually a "current" meta strategy that people tend to adhere to, kind of like a convention. And if you stray from that, you lose, even if your strategy would succeed in a vacuum.

For example, if the current meta is for employers to mainly use referrals/networking to hire, it would be a bad strategy to apply to postings.

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ricksunny

1 hour ago

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Thank you! Very helpful clarity, indeed sounds like an incredibly useful term!

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WiggleGuy

1 hour ago

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Very popular term in gaming

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-...

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ricksunny

1 hour ago

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Thank you! (Starts down fresh rabbit-hole...)

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YZF

1 hour ago

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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.