You search for a role, get eight results, and slowly realise they are the same job. This is not a glitch. It is how the market is wired.
Four ways one posting becomes many
- The employer cross-posts. A recruiter publishes to their own careers page and to two or three boards, by hand or through their applicant tracking system.
- Boards syndicate. Large aggregators buy or exchange feeds. One listing enters the network and appears on partner sites automatically, sometimes with the description rewritten.
- Agencies repost. A staffing firm working the requisition advertises it under their own name, without the employer.
- Scrapers copy. Smaller sites populate themselves from bigger ones, so the listing arrives third-hand with whatever errors accumulated on the way.
How to find the original
- Follow the apply link. If it lands on an applicant tracking system under the company's own domain, you are close to the source.
- Compare posting dates. The earliest date is usually the original; later copies inherit the date they were ingested, not the date the role opened.
- Compare descriptions. The original tends to be longer and less tidy. Syndicated copies get truncated and reformatted.
- Look for the requisition number. If one copy has an internal reference code and the others do not, that copy came from the employer's system.
Why it matters more than it seems
Duplication distorts everything downstream. A job board that counts listings rather than roles will tell you a market is three times larger than it is. Anyone drawing conclusions about hiring demand from raw posting counts is measuring syndication as much as demand.
It also wastes your time: applying through two copies of one role can look, from the employer's side, like two applications from the same person on the same day.
How this gets solved on the data side
Deduplication is the least glamorous and most valuable thing a job data provider does. It usually combines a normalised title, the employer identity, the location, and a fingerprint of the description. None of those alone is enough: the same company posts genuinely different roles with identical titles, and the same role gets rewritten between boards.
We collapse copies into one record and keep every source attached, so you can see where a role appeared and when. The count you see is roles, not listings.