How to Tell If a Job Posting Is Real

A frustrating amount of job-search effort goes into postings that were never going to result in a hire — at least not from the pile of public applicants.

This is less a conspiracy than a consequence of how organisations work. A job board entry is a cheap artefact, several different internal processes produce one, and only some of those processes end in someone reading your application.

Being able to tell them apart is worth more than another twenty applications.

The things that look like a job posting

A live requisition

What you want. Headcount is approved, a hiring manager wants the person, and a recruiter is working the pool now.

An evergreen pipeline posting

Common for roles a company hires continuously — sales, support, some engineering levels. The posting sits open permanently and collects candidates for whenever a slot opens.

Not dishonest, and applying is not pointless. But you are joining a pool that may sit untouched for months, and the timeliness advantage of applying early does not exist.

A compliance posting

Some roles must be advertised publicly even when the outcome is settled — a legal requirement in certain visa-sponsorship processes, or an internal policy requiring roles be posted before an internal candidate is confirmed.

The posting is genuine. The opportunity is largely not.

An abandoned requisition

Headcount was approved, then frozen, then the posting was forgotten. Nobody is reading the pile because nobody is being measured on filling it.

This is probably the largest category, and it is entirely mundane: the person who would have taken it down has other priorities.

An agency repost

An agency reposts a client's role, sometimes without the client's involvement, to attract candidates it can then represent. You may end up applying to the same role twice through two routes, which is a genuinely bad position — employers notice duplicate submissions and it can disqualify you from both.

Signals worth reading

None is conclusive. Together they are usually enough.

Age, and reposting

The strongest single signal. A role posted three days ago and a role posted four months ago are different objects even if the text is identical.

Watch for a posting that disappears and reappears with a fresh date. That pattern usually means either an evergreen pipeline or a requisition that keeps being reopened — the second of which tells you something unflattering about the role or the hiring bar.

Where a posting lives helps here. Roles on a company's own applicant tracking system carry a real posted date. Aggregators frequently show the date they scraped it, which can be months after it went live, and they routinely carry roles that have already been filled.

Specificity of the description

A live requisition usually has a hiring manager behind it who has thought about what they need. That leaks into the text: a named team, a specific technology or market, a problem to be solved, a stated reporting line.

A vague description — responsibilities that could belong to any company, a wish list assembled from a template — often means the posting was produced by process rather than by a person with a need.

Whether it names its context

"Reporting to the VP of Engineering, leading the platform group" is a claim someone had to make deliberately. "Join our dynamic team" is not. The presence of a real org chart in the text is a good sign.

Compensation

A published band suggests someone did the internal work of getting one approved. Its absence is not damning — it varies by state law and by company policy — but its presence is a positive signal.

The application form itself

A long, role-specific form with written questions is expensive for the employer to read. Nobody builds one for a requisition they are not working. A three-field form is cheap and tells you nothing.

Whether anyone is visible behind it

Search for the hiring manager or the recruiter. If someone is posting about building the team, the role is real and being worked. If nobody at the company has mentioned the function in a year, be sceptical.

What to actually do

Do not try to eliminate uncertainty. You cannot verify a requisition from the outside, and the effort of trying costs more than the occasional wasted application.

Weight your effort instead. A fresh posting on a company ATS with a specific description and a named reporting line deserves a tailored application. A four-month-old evergreen posting on an aggregator deserves, at most, five minutes.

Ask a person. The single most effective move available. One message to the internal recruiter — "is this role still open and actively being worked?" — resolves in a day what no amount of inference will. Recruiters generally answer, because a candidate who self-selects out of a dead requisition saves them time too.

Watch for duplicates before applying through an agency. If a role appears on both a company's own site and an agency listing, apply directly. Being submitted twice is worse than either route alone.

Treat a stale pile as a reason to go around it. If a role looks interesting but the posting looks dead, that is an argument for reaching the hiring manager or an internal recruiter directly rather than for skipping the company.

The part that matters

The reason this is worth caring about is not the wasted applications. It is what the wasted applications do to your judgement about your own search.

Sending forty applications into stale requisitions and hearing nothing produces a very specific and very wrong conclusion: that the market has no interest in you. The actual explanation may be that thirty of those postings had nobody behind them.

That misreading leads people to widen their targeting, lower their expectations, and increase volume — every one of which makes a senior search worse. Knowing which postings were real is what keeps the feedback you are getting interpretable.