A job listing is only useful while the job is open. This post explains how Seekless decides whether a listing is still live, what the “Verified live” time on every job means, and what we do about listings that look abandoned but were never taken down.
Every other night, every board is read again
Seekless re-reads every company’s job board every other night, the crawl described in How Seekless finds jobs. Each time the crawler sees a posting on the employer’s board, it records the time. That is what the job page shows as Verified live: the last time we saw the posting on the employer’s own board. It is not a check made when you open the page, and because the crawl runs every other day, it is normally less than two days old. When a posting disappears
When a clean read of a board finds jobs, and a posting we had before isn’t among them, that posting is closed straight away. Its page then says “This role is no longer listed by the company. It may have been filled or withdrawn.”, and tells search engines the page is gone.
Only a clean read counts. If the board blocked us, the page didn’t render, or the list came back cut short, nothing is closed on the strength of it.
A board that suddenly shows no jobs at all gets more caution, because an empty page is more often a broken page than a company that stopped hiring overnight. Seekless checks the individual job links instead, up to 200 per company per crawl. A job is closed only when its own link answers “not found”, or shows a page our classifier reads as a closed posting, twice, at least 20 hours apart. Any sign of life in between clears the strike.
If a closed posting comes back on the board, it is reopened, and its “First seen” date is kept.
Two backstops
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A job we haven’t seen for 45 days, at a company we also haven’t been able to read for 45 days, is closed. If more than 10,000 jobs would close this way at once, none are closed and we get an alert instead, because that pattern means something broke on our side, not on theirs.
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A job we haven’t seen for 30 days leaves our sitemap and asks search engines not to index it, even before it is formally closed.
Open, but is anyone hiring?
Some postings stay up for months. Some are real roles a company hires for all year; others were abandoned and nobody took them down. Since October 2026, every open job also gets a verdict built only from what our crawler has observed. It weighs:
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Age. How long since we first saw the posting, counting earlier reposts of it, from 60 days on.
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No edits. The description hasn’t changed in 90 days or more. We started tracking edits on October 9, 2026, so this signal can’t count before January 2027.
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Reposts. The same title and description taken down and put back up under a new ID within the last six months.
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The company’s pattern. Most of the company’s open roles have been up for 90 days or more.
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Missing pay. No pay range, in a state whose law requires one.
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A thin description. Very short, or shared word for word with several other roles at the same company.
A job with enough of these shows “May no longer be actively hiring”, with its reasons listed underneath. A posting that describes itself as a standing pool, such as “we’re always hiring registered nurses”, is labelled “Evergreen / pipeline role” instead, so you know it may not be one specific opening. A verdict moves a listing down the search results; it never hides it, and no listing is moved down without a label saying why. Scoring the whole corpus takes a few nights, so a job that has not been scored yet shows no label.
What this can’t catch
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A role the employer filled but left on its board looks open to us. The signals above exist for exactly that case, but they are evidence, not proof.
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A company whose board keeps blocking our crawler can show an old “Verified live” time, for up to 45 days. The time is on the page so you can see that for yourself.
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If you report a job as closed, the report is recorded and we see it, but it doesn’t close the job automatically yet.
All of this ends up as two things on every listing: when we last saw it live, and anything that suggests it isn’t. Run a search: every result shows when it was last verified, and carries a label wherever there is a reason for one.