The standard advice — follow up after a week, assume no news is bad news after two — is guesswork dressed as a rule. There is a better proxy, and it is public.
Use the posting, not the process
You cannot observe a hiring pipeline from outside. You can observe how long that employer's listings usually stay up before disappearing. If a company's postings typically vanish after eighteen days, a role you applied to on day two is probably being decided inside three weeks. If its postings sit for four months, your application is entering a queue, not a process.
What typical looks like
Median posting age varies enormously by role and market, which is precisely why an average is useless. Some patterns hold:
- High-volume roles — retail, hospitality, support, driving — turn over fastest. The listing is often gone within a fortnight because it was filled or the requisition expired.
- Specialist and senior roles sit longest. Two to three months is normal and says nothing bad about the employer.
- Roles at large firms sit longer than roles at small ones, because internal process is longer, not because interest is lower.
A practical reading
| Where you are | What it suggests |
|---|---|
| Listing gone, no reply | The role closed. A short, polite follow-up is fine; expect nothing. |
| Listing still up, well under the usual age | Normal. Following up adds nothing yet. |
| Listing still up, well past the usual age | The requisition is stalled. Worth one message; worth not waiting on it. |
| Listing re-posted with a new date | Something restarted. Reapplying is reasonable and sometimes necessary. |
The uncomfortable part
None of this tells you whether anyone read your application. It tells you whether the requisition is alive. Those are different questions, and only the second one is visible from outside — which is exactly why we measure it and do not claim the first.