GUIDE
Nothing stings like spending an hour tailoring a résumé for a job that was filled in March. Here are five checks, from quickest to most certain, that tell you whether a posting is worth your time.
Most boards show a date, but many employers "refresh" old postings to bump them to the top of results. A posting dated yesterday may have originally gone up six months ago. The date tells you when it was last touched, not when the search started.
This is the single most reliable check. If the posting is gone from the company's own site, the role is filled, paused, or cancelled — whatever the job board still says. Go to the source.
The same role reappearing every few weeks can mean high turnover, a hard-to-fill position, or an employer collecting résumés. None of these automatically disqualify it, but a role reposted five times in three months deserves a sharper question in the interview: what happened to the last person in this seat?
Paste the exact title into a search engine along with the company name. If the same posting appears with different dates on different boards, you're looking at one old posting being recycled — treat the oldest date as the truth.
If you applied weeks ago through a board and the posting is still up with a fresh date, the employer may be re-dating rather than hiring. It's not proof, but it's a signal to prioritize fresher leads.
The through-line: the employer's career page is the source of truth. Everything else is a copy, and copies go stale. That's why RealJobs tracks postings on the employer's own page and shows you the full history — first seen, last verified, every change — instead of just a date someone typed in.