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Nearly half of open tech and startup jobs are over two months old

The job you just applied to may have been up since summer. We measured how old open postings really are.

David Garcia
October 23, 2026 · 7 min read

We checked 29,918 open US jobs at 1,006 tech and startup companies in October 2026. 45% had been posted more than 60 days earlier, and 2,311 had been up for over a year. The typical open job was 53 days old.

If you've sent applications into silence, this may be part of the reason. Some old postings are real roles that are hard to fill. Others are evergreen pipelines, or jobs nobody took down after they were filled. Only about 100 of them said so in the title, like "talent pool" or "general application". The rest look exactly like a role that opened yesterday.

How we measured it

yabot.jobs collects jobs directly from company career sites, not from other job boards. For this analysis we used the companies whose careers pages run on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workable. These platforms publish every open job with the date it was posted, so we can see the whole board, old jobs included.

• Still open: the job was live on the company's own careers page at least once between October 16 and 23, 2026.
• Age: days from the posting date the platform published to October 23, 2026.
• One posting per job: duplicates are counted once. US jobs only. We left out a few very large boards that we may not have captured in full.

These platforms are popular with tech companies and startups, so that's what this sample describes. Large employers on Workday or Oracle aren't included. Ages are conservative: when a job had no original publish date, we used its last-updated date.

What we found

1. Nearly half of open jobs are over two months old

The typical open job was 53 days old. About 1 in 13 had been up for more than a year.

2. Every field has the problem

Even the field with the freshest postings, HR, had a third of its open jobs over 60 days old. Stale postings are a habit of how these companies hire, not a quirk of one job type.

3. At many companies, most of the board is old

Of the 555 companies with 10 or more open jobs, 224 (40%) had more than half their postings older than 60 days. At 44 of them, at least 80% were. At those employers, the listing you see is more likely a standing pipeline than a seat someone needs filled this month.

4. Almost nothing gets posted on weekends

Across every company yabot.jobs tracks, about 16,000 US jobs were posted on a typical weekday from September 28 to October 18, against about 1,400 on a weekend day. New jobs arrive on weekdays, so weekday searches turn up the fresh ones.

How this compares with other research

Our numbers measure age, not intent: an old posting can still be a real job. Studies of ghost jobs, postings with no intent to hire, put them at 18–22% of the jobs posted on Greenhouse in a given quarter (Greenhouse, 2024).

Studies of job boards find far fewer old listings. Clarify Capital found that 1 in 7 Indeed listings had been up for 30 days or more (Clarify Capital, 2026). On company career pages, we found 69% (20,583 of 29,918 jobs). Part of the gap is the sample: we looked at four platforms popular with tech companies. Part may be the dates: a board shows when a listing was published or refreshed, and as the Caterpillar example below shows, a refreshed listing can look brand new.

Employers also say why they leave jobs up. In a survey of 1,000 US employers, 2 in 5 said keeping a position open long-term attracts better candidates (Clarify Capital, 2025).

Why you can't trust the date on the posting

The date on a careers page, when there is one, isn't always when the job went up. About 1 in 13 open jobs we track come with no posting date at all. Three jobs from October 2026:

• Hidden date: Peraton's Cloud Infrastructure Engineer page shows no date. The date, October 23, is only in the page's code. yabot.jobs shows it.
• No date anywhere: Amazon's Software Development Engineer, AWS Private Pricing page has no date at all. yabot.jobs shows October 23, the day it found the job, which matches the date on Amazon's own search listing.
• Refreshed date: Caterpillar's Senior Autonomy Systems Engineer said "Posted Today" on October 23. When yabot.jobs first found it on September 19, the same listing said it was posted September 15. The listing was refreshed and its date reset, so a job that had been up for more than five weeks looked new. yabot.jobs never dates a job later than the day it first found it, so it still shows this one as posted in mid-September.

How to avoid ghost jobs

1. Check the job's age on yabot.jobs. Many company careers pages don't show a posting date at all, and some job boards show the day they picked the job up. yabot.jobs shows when the company posted it, or the day we first found it, and marks a job closed when it comes down from a site we read in full.
2. Treat postings over 60 days old as a long shot. Apply if it's a great fit, but don't count on it, and spend more of your time on newer ones.
3. Look at the company's other listings. If most of its jobs are months old, it's likely recruiting for a pipeline.
4. Search on weekdays and set alerts. New postings land Monday to Friday. An alert lets you apply in the first few days.

Common questions

What share of job postings are ghost jobs?

There's no single number. Greenhouse estimates 18–22% of the jobs posted on its platform in a given quarter. In our data, 45% of open tech and startup jobs were over 60 days old, which is a warning sign, not proof.

Is a job posted more than 30 days ago a ghost job?

Not necessarily. Some roles take months to fill, and some companies hire for the same role all year. Treat age as one signal, and check whether most of the company's other jobs are old too.

How can I tell when a job was really posted?

Check the job on yabot.jobs. It shows the date the company's own site gives, or the day we first found the job, and never a date later than that.