← Hiring data

How old are the dates on live tech job ads?

43.6% of 10,800 still-listed tech job ads in our European sample carried publication dates older than 60 days. We checked the employers’ public feeds again for this snapshot, rather than relying on dates saved earlier.

517 employers across Greenhouse, Ashby and SmartRecruiters. Checked 25 October 2026, 19:24 to 19:25 UTC. This sample describes the postings we track in these three systems; it is not an estimate of the whole European market.

An old date does not identify a ghost job

An employer may be hiring continuously, looking for a hard-to-find skill, or keeping an evergreen ad live. A public feed cannot tell us the hiring manager’s intent. These numbers describe publication timestamps on ads that were listed when checked. They do not measure unfilled positions, response rates or continuous hiring time.

By country

At least 100 ads per row. An ad naming several countries appears in each relevant row, so rows overlap.

By technology mentioned in the ad

The 15 largest technology groups. An ad can mention several technologies; these rows also overlap.

How we checked

We started with 10,806 open Sottava postings in the three systems, tagged with at least one technology and at least one of our included European countries. We reread 518 public employer feeds. An ad entered this snapshot only if its source ID was still present and the feed supplied a valid publication timestamp. Creation and update timestamps were excluded. Ads sharing a title are separate postings when they have separate source IDs.

Four candidate ads lacked a usable current ID/date match, and two ads belonged to an unavailable feed. They were excluded, not classified as closed. For 112 Ashby ads, the current publication date differed by at least a day from our saved value. This snapshot uses the current source date. Ashby reports the last publication, so the date need not be the first time a role was advertised.

Ages are the elapsed days between the source timestamp and the end of the check at 19:25:31 UTC. Percentages use the posting count for the relevant group; medians use individual ages. Country labels and technology tags come from Sottava’s existing automated parsing and can include adjacent product or business roles. We did not independently review every tag or measure the number of underlying vacancies or applications.

Use and cite the data

Cite “Sottava, Publication dates on live European tech job ads, 25 October 2026” and link to this dated page. The downloadable aggregate data and chart use the same snapshot. For questions or a follow-up cut, email support@sottava.com.