Why We're Moving to 90-Day Job Expiration

If you've ever spent an hour researching a role, tailoring your application, and submitting it, only to hear nothing back, you're not alone. One of the most frustrating parts of job searching is uncertainty: Is this job even still open?

At Better Job Board, we already try to reduce that uncertainty in a few ways:

• Every day, we verify postings and remove any that the employer says are no longer open.
• Each posting clearly shows when it was created so you can make informed decisions.
• Any posting more than a year old is automatically removed.

That last policy is overdue for a change. Starting with the next daily refresh, we're shortening the automatic expiration window from 365 days to 90 days.

Why Expire Postings at All?

If a company's system says a role is still open, why would we override that and remove the posting? Shouldn't the employer decide when to take down a listing?

In an ideal world, yes!

In practice, though, many employers do not have the time or resources to keep listings current. Some roles get filled, but the posting stays up for months. Others are never filled, yet remain active indefinitely. And some "always hiring" or "brand visibility" listings do not reflect a concrete opening at all.

The result is more noise for job seekers, who have to sort through stale listings to find real opportunities.

How Long is Too Long?

Choosing an expiration window is a balancing act. If it is too long, stale listings clutter the board. If it is too short, legitimate openings may disappear before the hiring process is actually over.

Some roles really do stay open for months. Senior, niche, and hard-to-fill positions can take longer to close. Large companies may also move slowly, with multiple interview rounds and internal approvals stretching out the process.

At first, we thought a more conservative 180-day window might be the right middle ground. But when we looked at the data, there was not much practical difference between a 180-day cutoff and a 365-day cutoff:

• 962 postings between 180 and 365 days old
• 2,770 postings between 90 and 180 days old
• 13,522 postings newer than 90 days old

When we combined that with our own experience, and with the standard advice job seekers already hear to prioritize newer postings, 90 days felt like the more reasonable default.

It may, in fact, still be too conservative.

We'll keep watching the data and may adjust this further over time. Our goal is simple: help job seekers spend less time on stale listings and more time on real opportunities.