we re-opened 1,165 job listings. one in four was already gone.

you've lived this: you find the job, you spend an evening on the application, you click through to submit — and the posting is gone. not “position filled.” gone gone. 404.

we wanted to know how often that actually happens, so we measured it on our own inventory. pirch's verified-jobs pool only contains listings that were opened and confirmed live and accepting applicants — every one within the last month, most within the last two weeks. this week we went back and re-opened all 1,165 of them.

method, in one breath: we fetched every listing politely (with retries), and only called a job dead when the page itself was deleted — an http 404 or 410, the server saying “this posting no longer exists.” 432 listings sat behind bot walls that wouldn't let an automated check through, so we excluded them entirely rather than guess. that left 733 listings with a definitive answer. the raw results are here — every verdict, every timestamp.

the decay curve

the longer it had been since we verified a listing, the likelier it was to be dead — no surprise. what surprised us was how early the dying starts. these are real jobs, remember: each one had a live page, a real employer, an application form that worked. this isn't a ghost-job story about postings that were never real. it's the other problem — real listings just don't live very long.

where the bodies aren't

one more honest wrinkle: the boards that blocked our checker (403s, rate limits) might die faster or slower than the ones that didn't — we can't know, so they're out of the numbers. and sources differ: of the listings we could check, one major aggregator's jobs were dead 30% of the time while one smaller remote board's were dead 15% of the time. where a listing lives changes how long it lives.

if you want the companion problem — postings that were never really open in the first place — that's a different pathology with its own field guide: how to spot ghost jobs. today's data is about honest jobs dying fast. the research on never-real jobs (1 in 7, per the study Forbes covered in april; up to 21% in the academic estimate) stacks ON TOP of this decay. the pool you're fishing in is smaller than it looks, twice over.

what to do with this

the practical reading isn't “apply faster, panic more.” it's that freshness is a real variable and you mostly can't see it. a listing's posted date is public; whether anyone re-confirmed it's alive is not. so put your effort where decay can't eat it: apply the same day you find something good, front-load the roles that genuinely fit instead of queueing twenty maybes for the weekend, and treat any application older than a week as spent — follow up once, then let it go.

and when a posting 404s mid-application: it was never about you. the door didn't slam. it was already gone — you just couldn't see it from the hallway.