How to tell whether a job posting is actually live

Before you spend an hour tailoring an application, it is worth asking whether anyone is going to read it.

Not every posting you can apply to is a posting someone is hiring for. Some were filled weeks ago and never taken down. Some are open permanently because the employer collects applications for a role they fill once a year. Some were never going to be filled at all.

Three things you can check without any tool

1. 1

   Does the same role appear on the company's own careers page? This is the check that does the most work for the least effort. Job boards keep listings long after an employer has moved on, because a board's incentive is inventory. The employer's own page is the only place with an incentive to be current. If the role is on a board and nowhere on the company's site, that gap is the finding.

2. 2

   How long has it been sitting there? Boards reset the posted date constantly, so the figure next to a listing is often the date it was re-syndicated rather than the date it was published. The career page usually does not do that. A role that has been on the employer's own site for months is telling you something the board's “posted 2 days ago” is hiding.

3. 3

   Has the wording been reposted verbatim elsewhere? Paste a distinctive sentence from the description into a search engine in quotes. A description that appears identically across a dozen sites, under different agencies, is usually one role being marketed by several intermediaries — or a pipeline-building exercise that no single employer is accountable for.

What a long-open role actually means

Most people read an old posting as a warning: it has been up for months, so hundreds must have applied and I am late. That reading is usually backwards. A role far past its market's median is not over-subscribed — it is under-filled. The employer has been trying and has not found the person yet, which is the situation in which a candidate who is close rather than perfect gets a conversation.

The posting that deserves the most scepticism is the opposite case: one that exists only on an aggregator, with no trace on the employer's own site. Nobody there has committed to it publicly, and there is often no one on the other end of it.

Why this is worth two minutes

A tailored application is an hour of work: reading the description properly, rewriting the top of your CV, writing a letter that is about them rather than about you. Two minutes of checking in front of that hour changes what you spend the hour on. It does not make you apply to fewer roles. It makes the roles you apply to ones where somebody is waiting to read it.