How we measure · 2026-08-28
How we measure posting age, and what it does not mean
The definition is narrow on purpose. A wider one would be more impressive and less true.
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Notes on the job market, and on the messy business of turning job postings into data you can trust.
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21 posts
Working with job data · 2026-08-26
What a job data API actually gives you
The pitch is “millions of listings”. The work is in the fields nobody advertises.
Job market · 2026-08-25
What posting age tells you about a market
Two markets can have identical vacancy counts and behave completely differently. Age is what separates them.
Building products · 2026-08-23
Building a job board: what you actually need
The listings are the easy part. Everything that makes a board worth visiting is downstream of them.
Pay · 2026-08-21
How to read a salary range without fooling yourself
The number in a job ad is a negotiating position, a legal artefact, and a filter — usually all three at once.
Working with job data · 2026-08-19
Deduplicating job postings is harder than it looks
Exact matching finds a fraction. Fuzzy matching merges roles that are genuinely different. Here is the shape of the problem.
Building products · 2026-08-16
Structured data for job postings, and why most implementations are wrong
JobPosting markup is how a listing gets into Google Jobs. The common errors are all in the same three fields.
For job seekers · 2026-08-14
How to tell if a job posting is real
Six signals you can check in under a minute, ranked by how much they actually tell you.
Working with job data · 2026-08-12
The applicant tracking system landscape, from the outside
Most job postings pass through a dozen or so systems. Knowing which changes what you can collect.
How we measure · 2026-08-11
What counts as one posting
Every number on this site depends on this definition, so here it is in full.
Job market · 2026-08-09
Why job counts differ between sources, by a lot
Two providers report the same market and differ threefold. Usually none of them is lying.
For job seekers · 2026-08-07
What ghost jobs are, and what the research actually says
The number everyone quotes is 20%. Here is where it comes from, what it measures, and why the other estimates disagree.
Pay · 2026-08-05
Why so few job ads show pay, and where that is changing
Disclosure is a policy artefact, not a courtesy. The map explains most of the variation.
For job seekers · 2026-07-31
Why the same job appears on five different sites
Cross-posting, syndication and scraping produce four copies of one role. Here is how to tell which is the original.
Working with job data · 2026-07-29
Normalising job titles: the problem nobody has solved well
Titles are marketing, not taxonomy. Every approach to grouping them trades one kind of error for another.
Job market · 2026-07-27
Reading hiring momentum without fooling yourself
A 30% jump in postings usually means something changed in the pipeline, not in the economy.
For job seekers · 2026-07-24
How long to wait after applying, according to the listings themselves
You cannot see inside a company's process. You can see how long its postings usually stay open.
Building products · 2026-07-22
Job search interfaces: what helps and what is decoration
People filter by outcome, not by taxonomy. Most job search UI is organised the wrong way round.
Job market · 2026-07-19
Remote work: what the postings actually say
Advertised remote share is a measurement of what employers are willing to write down, which is not the same as how people work.
Pay · 2026-07-17
What a median salary tells you, and what it hides
A single number describes a distribution badly. Four numbers describe it well enough to act on.
How we measure · 2026-07-15
What we do not know
A list of the gaps in our own data, published because you will find them anyway.