GUIDE
Conventional wisdom says never apply to anything older than two weeks. Conventional wisdom is wrong often enough to be worth examining. An old posting isn't automatically dead — but it does ask you to do homework first.
It's still on the employer's career page. This is the whole test. A posting from four months ago that's still listed on the company's own site is a live opening — possibly a hard-to-fill role, possibly evergreen hiring. Either way, someone will read your application.
The description has evolved. If the posting's requirements or pay have been edited over time, someone is actively managing it. That's a live search, not a forgotten page.
It's a specialized role. Niche technical and executive searches routinely run for months. Age correlates with difficulty here, not with death.
It's gone from the employer's page but still on the board. You're looking at a stale copy. Don't apply — the role is filled or cancelled, and the board just hasn't caught up.
It's been refreshed a dozen times with no changes. Automated re-dating without edits usually means the posting is on autopilot. Your application joins a pile nobody is reading promptly.
The same role has cycled for over a year. At some point persistence stops looking like patience and starts looking like churn. Check what the pattern suggests before investing hours.
Before applying to anything older than a month: open the employer's career page, confirm the posting is there, and glance at its history if you can. Two minutes of verification beats two hours of tailoring a résumé for a closed role.
RealJobs does that verification for every listing, every day — first seen, last verified, full history attached. Old postings aren't hidden; they're labeled with their age, so you can make the call yourself.