A job board that closes a role when the employer does

Three kinds of ghost job

Only one of them is something you can avoid by choosing a different source. Be suspicious of any product that claims otherwise.

Why aggregators produce stale copies

An aggregator's job is breadth. It ingests postings from many sources — some by feed, some by scraping, some resubmitted from other aggregators — and the further a posting travels from the employer, the weaker the link back to the truth.

The specific failure is this: a posting disappearing from its source is not an event, it is an absence. To notice it, something has to re-read the source, compare the whole list, and conclude that the roles missing today are gone. A system that only ingests what it is sent is never told, so it keeps showing the role.

How this catalogue is built

• Employers' own boards, through their provider's API285 companies, read through the public JSON APIs of Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Workable and Recruitee. No HTML scraping, no aggregator in the chain. A board is only added once the provider's own response confirms the company.
• Absence means closedA crawl closes every role it did not see — which is why a board must be read to the end before its result counts. A truncated read would close roles that are still posted, so an incomplete run is discarded rather than trusted.
• A repost reopens, it does not re-announceIf a company reposts a role, the existing listing reopens rather than appearing as brand new, so a repost cannot masquerade as fresh hiring.
• A real first-seen dateRecorded on the first complete read of that board. 'New since your last check' is measured against that board's first successful crawl as well as your own last visit, so adding a company does not flood the feed with roles open for a year.
• Every link goes to the employerYou apply on the company's own page. SchoolWhool never collects an application, never republishes an employer's full description, and is not the employer.

What to check on any job board

• Does the apply link go to the employer?Straight to their careers page or applicant tracking system — not an interstitial, not an 'easy apply' form the board holds.
• Is there a date, and is it the employer's?'Posted 3 days ago' that never changes is a red flag. So is no date at all.
• Does it say where postings come from?'Thousands of sources' means the answer is: we do not know either.
• Is the same role listed at three companies?A sign you are looking at reposted staffing-agency inventory rather than employers.