Study Finds 28 Percent of Job Postings Have Been Open Over 90 Days; Researchers Say the Jobs Seem Happy Where They Are
Median posting age is 36 days. The median posting has also stopped checking its email.
NEW YORK — A report released Tuesday by the job-data firm Unlisted found that 28.3 percent of the more than 600,000 job postings it monitors on company career pages have been open for longer than 90 days, a figure researchers say reflects not a hiring crisis but a large number of positions that have simply gotten comfortable.
"At some point a posting stops being a vacancy and becomes a resident," said Ottilie Mbeki-Sandoval, a labor researcher who reviewed the findings. "It has its own URL. It gets traffic. It has watched three reorgs from the inside. I would not want to be the person who tells it to leave."
The study found wide differences by platform, with 48.2 percent of postings on one applicant-tracking system older than three months, compared with 17.2 percent on another, which Mbeki-Sandoval attributed to "the eternal question of whether anyone knows where the button is."
Applicants reported mixed experiences. "I have applied to the same Senior Platform Engineer role four times since March," said Dashiell Onwuachi-Berg, 34, of Denver. "Each time the requirements have grown by one year of experience. I am confident that if I wait long enough, I will eventually be the only person alive who qualifies, and they will still want someone with Kubernetes."
About 4.2 percent of positions that closed reappeared within 30 days under the same title, which hiring managers described in interviews as "a clean restart," "a new chapter," and, in one case, "the same job but we changed a comma."
A recruiter at a mid-sized software company, who asked not to be named, said many long-running postings serve an important purpose. "The posting shows investors we are growing," the recruiter said. "The interview loop shows employees we are careful. And the fact that nobody gets hired shows finance we are disciplined. It is the only thing at this company that makes three departments happy at once."
At press time, a posting for a Staff Engineer (Remote) first listed in February had celebrated its 200th day by adding a requirement that candidates be willing to relocate.