7 ms·

How long do job postings stay open?

33 points by _tgxm 7mo ago

JSR_FDED 7mo ago
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.
- _tgxm 7mo ago
  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)
- cornholio 7mo ago
  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.
  - Ultimatt 7mo ago
    I actually think there is a different effect at play which is the technical need is growing in seniority and complexity as people have large established software systems. The junior market has high accessibility but the senior actually takes a while to get anyone through the door. My current job had been advertised for 6 months, it needed a relatively insane set of knowledge and skills where I only really had maybe 50-60% of the ask. I literally had to learn all of GCP from scratch and I was still a better fit than you're likely to find. I think this is also the same trend AI is making worse as the demand for junior also goes down you'll see these averages climb as most hiring becomes more senior.
    - cornholio 7mo ago
      There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc. What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI. The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.
      - 0x3f 7mo ago
        Sometimes I find the pigeonholing thing is just siloing and laziness. The last guy did our infra, nobody else wants to learn it, so the trivial thing to do is just hire on a tick-box basis. I'm at a company now where one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. Couldn't even be bothered to learn enough to hire for it. And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it. Hate React if you want but come on guys, it's not a massively complex framework to learn the basics of.
        cornholio 7mo ago
        > one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. React is close to an industry standard, sounds like bad management. Again, you don't have to know React to hire for React, just bring "smart and gets thing done" people onboard and trust them on their word that they can quickly learn anything they need to get it done. Clear responsibilities and goals, trust, swift consequences if that trust is breached.
- prawn 7mo ago
  I think hospitality can sometimes struggle to get strong candidates at all so might leave positions open longer hoping for better applicants.
  - mono442 7mo ago
    I read some time ago that hospitality is the lowest-paying industry. It’s unrealistic to expect strong candidates there.
- rsynnott 7mo ago
  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.
chalcolithic 7mo ago
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.
- Vaslo 7mo ago
  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.
  - chalcolithic 7mo ago
    Funny enough, on a local glassdoor clone the guys who failed technical interview discussed exactly this possibility precisely because the post was open for so long:)
- jjav 7mo ago
  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.
- firesteelrain 7mo ago
  We called them funnel reqs. They were perpetually renewed. It was to get people hired fast.
ipnon 7mo ago
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.
- skybrian 7mo ago
  If someone does that, how do they then convert it into a job?
- ricksunny 7mo ago
  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).
  - WiggleGuy 7mo ago
    Very popular term in gaming https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-gaming/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-...
    - ricksunny 7mo ago
      Thank you! (Starts down fresh rabbit-hole...)
  - etskinner 7mo ago
    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.
umairnadeem123 7mo ago
[dead]
dixie_land 7mo ago
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
alex43578 7mo ago
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.
Areena_28 7mo ago
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.
nivcmo 7mo ago
[dead]

33 points by _tgxm 7mo ago

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.

_tgxm 7mo ago
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)
cornholio 7mo ago
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.
- Ultimatt 7mo ago
  I actually think there is a different effect at play which is the technical need is growing in seniority and complexity as people have large established software systems. The junior market has high accessibility but the senior actually takes a while to get anyone through the door. My current job had been advertised for 6 months, it needed a relatively insane set of knowledge and skills where I only really had maybe 50-60% of the ask. I literally had to learn all of GCP from scratch and I was still a better fit than you're likely to find. I think this is also the same trend AI is making worse as the demand for junior also goes down you'll see these averages climb as most hiring becomes more senior.
  - cornholio 7mo ago
    There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc. What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI. The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.
    - 0x3f 7mo ago
      Sometimes I find the pigeonholing thing is just siloing and laziness. The last guy did our infra, nobody else wants to learn it, so the trivial thing to do is just hire on a tick-box basis. I'm at a company now where one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. Couldn't even be bothered to learn enough to hire for it. And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it. Hate React if you want but come on guys, it's not a massively complex framework to learn the basics of.
      - cornholio 7mo ago
        > one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. React is close to an industry standard, sounds like bad management. Again, you don't have to know React to hire for React, just bring "smart and gets thing done" people onboard and trust them on their word that they can quickly learn anything they need to get it done. Clear responsibilities and goals, trust, swift consequences if that trust is breached.
prawn 7mo ago
I think hospitality can sometimes struggle to get strong candidates at all so might leave positions open longer hoping for better applicants.
- mono442 7mo ago
  I read some time ago that hospitality is the lowest-paying industry. It’s unrealistic to expect strong candidates there.
rsynnott 7mo ago
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.

chalcolithic 7mo ago

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.

Vaslo 7mo ago
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.
- chalcolithic 7mo ago
  Funny enough, on a local glassdoor clone the guys who failed technical interview discussed exactly this possibility precisely because the post was open for so long:)
jjav 7mo ago
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.
firesteelrain 7mo ago
We called them funnel reqs. They were perpetually renewed. It was to get people hired fast.

ipnon 7mo ago

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.

skybrian 7mo ago
If someone does that, how do they then convert it into a job?
ricksunny 7mo ago
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).
- WiggleGuy 7mo ago
  Very popular term in gaming https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-gaming/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-...
  - ricksunny 7mo ago
    Thank you! (Starts down fresh rabbit-hole...)
- etskinner 7mo ago
  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.

umairnadeem123 7mo ago

[dead]

dixie_land 7mo ago

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

alex43578 7mo ago

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.

Areena_28 7mo ago

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.

nivcmo 7mo ago

[dead]