How long do analyst job postings stay up? Posting age and ghost job signals

The board first sees a posting when it reads that employer's careers site, so a company added to the board recently brings postings that were already weeks old. Of the 14,138 postings with an employer posting date, 4,809 (34%) were posted 30 or more days before the board first saw them.

First-seen dates are only stable from 29 July 2026: before that day the sync reset them daily. 147 (under 1%) postings carry a first-seen date of 29 July 2026 and may be older than it shows, so every over-60 and over-90 figure here is a floor.

593 groups of postings share the same company, title and location under different apply links, 1,389 postings in all, or 796 (5%) extra copies. Some are genuine (several hires for one role, or one posting per team); some are reposts of a role that never closed. The posting text cannot tell them apart.

Most extra copies: Amazon (53), Talan (53), Arthur J. Gallagher (41), Omnicom Media (20) and EXL (19).

A ghost job is a posting the employer does not intend to fill. Nothing in a posting's text proves that, and the signals people quote (a role open for months, a role reposted again and again) need a history of when each posting appeared and disappeared.

The board keeps only live postings. When a role leaves the employer's careers site, the next daily sync deletes it, so its closing date and lifetime are not stored. The age and duplicate counts above are the honest part of the question we can answer today.

• Treat a posting live for more than 60 days as a question, not a verdict. 4% of live postings are that old by first-seen date; check whether the role still appears on the company's own careers page before you invest in a cover letter.
• Prefer the employer's posting date over a job board's posted ago label. Boards that rescrape daily can show an old role as new.
• When one company lists the same title and city several times, apply once, to the posting that matches your team or level.
• Every role on the board links straight to the employer's own application page, so a role that has closed there disappears from the board within a day.

• Sample: every live posting on realanalystjobs.com on 7 November 2026, read from employers' own careers sites and applicant tracking systems. Employer-posted listings (4) are left out because they expire on their own schedule, and so are the reposting sites Jobgether and Weekday (199 postings). 14,733 postings remain.
• First-seen date: the day the daily sync first stored the posting's apply link. It has been stable since 29 July 2026; earlier rows read that date.
• Posting date: the date the employer's careers site publishes for the posting, when it publishes one. It is never inferred from text.
• Age is whole days from that date to the day the page was computed. Medians are of whole days; shares are of the postings in that column.
• Duplicates: postings whose company (normalized name), title (lower case, punctuation dropped) and location text are identical while their apply links differ.
• Every number is recomputed from the live board each time the page loads, and the JSON download carries the same numbers.

• This measures postings that are still live. It says nothing about postings that already closed, which is where a closure rate would come from.
• First-seen age is a lower bound on true age: a posting found when its company was added to the board was already live elsewhere.
• Posting dates come from the careers site platform. Some platforms never publish one, and an employer can refresh a date without changing the role.
• A duplicate here is a text match. It cannot tell a repost from several open seats for one job.
• realanalystjobs.com reads a large set of company careers sites, but not every employer, so this is not the whole market.

• Share of postings that close, and median days live until closing. Closed postings are deleted by the daily sync, not archived, so no closing date is stored. To measure it the board would keep each closed row with a closed-on date (or log apply link, company, title, first-seen and closed-on to a closures table) and publish once a few months of closures exist.
• Repost rate (a role closed and listed again). Needs the closures history above plus a fingerprint of company, normalized title and location, so a new apply link matching a recently closed fingerprint can be counted as a repost.
• Ghost job rate. Intent to hire cannot be read from a posting. Even with closure history, a long-open or reposted role is a signal, not proof, so we would publish those signals by name, not a ghost job percentage.

1. realanalystjobs.com live board: Every live analyst posting on 7 November 2026, with its first-seen date and the employer's posting date where one exists.