How long do job postings stay open?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.