The Disappearing Job Posting

While scrolling through job leads on the Internet have you ever stumbled upon the “perfect job” and the very next day you go back to look at it again and it’s gone – it had disappeared? This can be a maddening occurrence for job seekers which leads to speculations abound regarding what could have happened. As a former HR insider let me shed some light on what is happening from the employers perspective.

First of all there is no law or universal rule dictating how long a job needs to be posted. Each company can set its own policy or guidelines on this. A job can be posted for as little as a single day. When this occurs it typically means the company has either an internal or known candidate already identified.

Another reason a job posting may disappear is that funding or internal support for the position has been lost. This doesn’t necessarily mean the job is gone for good, just for now.

Sometimes a job posting disappears because it needs to be amended or revamped because it wasn’t attracting the right type of candidate or the company realizes they need something different.

On the contrary, sometimes jobs seem to stay on a website well after a pool of candidates is selected for interviews. This is because an employer wants to be sure they continue to collect resumes in the event the existing pool doesn’t produce a finalist or the finalist declines the job. This way they don’t have to start from scratch.

The best advice I can offer is as soon as you see a job online that looks good – print it out right away. This will give you time to review it more closely, before it disappears.