What’s the Rush? Timing Fortune 500 Job Opportunities

Examining durations of Fortune 500 job postings and what it means for job seekers

September 2024 Spotlight

Imagine a job at a Fortune 500 company – perhaps you picture a finance position in New York City, or a tech job at Google or Amazon. But what do Fortune 500 job opportunities actually look like? This series from the National Labor Exchange (NLx) Research Hub utilizes our job feed data to provide insights to those supporting the workforce system, from case managers or business service representatives at a local American Job Center, to policy analysts or administrators at a central office, recruiters, and everyone in between. If you are trying to connect workers to good jobs, looking at jobs with financially stable companies is critical, and where better to start than with large high-revenue companies.

On average, Fortune 500 job opportunities posted in 2023 were available in the NLx for three and a half months, but a typical (median) Fortune 500 job opportunity was only available for just over a month. What does this mean and what can we learn from it?

In this Spotlight, we explore the complicated topic of posting duration for Fortune 500 job opportunities. We discuss what it means for a position to be “available,” why some positions have been available for more than a year, and what this means for job seekers.

A job opportunity is considered “available” as long as it exists in the NLx. Other terms that are often used include “open,” “listed,” or “posted.” Depending on the source of the opportunity, it might be removed after a set period (e.g., an opportunity that was manually entered into a state job bank with a default duration of 30 days) or manually when the job is filled (e.g., an opportunity posted on a corporate website that is removed once the position is filled). Either way, there is much we can learn from looking at how long job opportunities were available.

In 2023, the average (mean) posting time for a Fortune 500 job opportunity was 111 days, while the typical (median) posting time was just 37 days. In other words, while the majority of these job openings were available for less than two months, some openings had been available for much longer. The longest job posting was available for over 16 years – yes, first spotted in the NLx in 2007!

Is there a pattern to which job opportunities have longer posting times? Are there certain states, occupation groups, or employers that tend to have jobs posted for longer timeframes? While there are likely many factors that go into determining how long a job opportunity is available, here we explore three potential sources of variation that might explain the large differences in posting times for Fortune 500 job opportunities: states, occupation groups, and employers. To do this, we use statistical decomposition methods that attribute portions of the variation in posting times seen in the 2023 Fortune 500 data to each of these potential factors (please see the Methodology at the end for more details).

Differences between States

One possible explanation for time posting variations is that job openings might fill more quickly in certain states with a workforce that is relatively large and well-aligned to meet labor demand. Additionally, states can set policy and practices (particularly within job bank technology systems) regarding how long postings are available in their job banks, which also might explain some variation. However, a state survey conducted by the NLx in 2021 shows that most states do not have strict limitations on the time a job can be posted. Where there are limitations, states will often have default posting periods (e.g., 30, 60, or 90 days) that can be overridden as needed.* Overall, there isn’t a strong legislative rationale for variation in posting times between states. Indeed, our decomposition of the variation in time posted for Fortune 500 job opportunities (seen below) shows that differences between states’ job posting times don’t explain much of the variation in time posted for Fortune 500 job opportunities in 2023. These results do not imply that there aren’t differences in posting times between states, but rather that the differences within states are so large that they essentially eliminate any patterns we might see between states.

*The NLx 2021 state survey report summarizes state time limits on jobs received from the NLx and staff/employer-entered jobs as follows:

“• Many states do not apply any time limit to NLx jobs (with a few exceptions of 30/90 day limits), instead relying on the daily refresh to ensure postings are up to date.

• Time limits of 30, 60, or 90 days typically apply to staff/employer-entered jobs, or each job order is customized.

• Most states have the option to extend individual job openings at the employer's request.”

Differences between Occupation Groups

Conceptually, it makes sense for there to be variation in the time jobs are posted between different occupation groups. For example, there are different sized candidate pools relative to openings for different occupations (e.g., labor shortages might exist in one occupation group but not in another) stemming from the amount of job changing or movement that commonly occurs within the occupation or the alignment of trained workers to demand, etc. However, our decomposition of the variation in time posted for Fortune 500 job opportunities (seen below) shows that while occupation group differences account for a bit more of the variation than states, they still explain very little of the overall variation in time posted for Fortune 500 job opportunities in 2023. Again, these results reflect more the large differences in posting times within each occupation group that eliminate any patterns we might see in differences between occupation groups.

It is unlikely that it takes these employers years to fill a vacant position. Instead, “evergreen” job postings are a plausible explanation for job opportunities that have been available for a “very long time.” Evergreen job advertisements are ones where the employer leaves a job opening up in perpetuity. Essentially, they either hire so frequently for a particular role or have such a hard time finding the specific skills they need, that they just leave it posted and pull applicants as needed. Think of food prep positions at a fast-food chain, for example.

Evergreen job postings complicate any job posting dataset because one posting does not equate to one job opening and there is nothing in the data to indicate when the position has been filled since it does not “close out” like a traditional posting. Unfortunately, there’s no obvious way to identify for certain which postings are being used as evergreen postings, although we can assume that postings that have been available for a “very long time” are likely evergreen.

Since evergreen postings skew job posting statistics such as averages but are also difficult to identify in the data, how can we inform job seekers in how much time they have to apply to traditional (i.e., non-evergreen) Fortune 500 job opportunities? Let’s instead look at how quickly Fortune 500 job opportunities are removed.

• We have no job postings in the 2023 Fortune 500 data that are available for fewer than four days, but at six days, 3% of all 2023 Fortune 500 job opportunities have already been removed.

• At two weeks, 17% of all 2023 Fortune 500 job opportunities have been removed.

• We see a large spike in job opportunities that were removed at 34 days, which might be a result of 30-day posting policies either at the state or employer level.

• By 40 days, just over half (53%) of all 2023 Fortune 500 job opportunities have been removed.

• One of the last large spikes we see is at 94 days, which could also be a result of 90-day posting policies either at the state or employer level. At this point, over three quarters (77%) of all Fortune 500 postings have been removed.

While not true for all job opportunities, this trend indicates that job seekers shouldn’t expect Fortune 500 job openings to be posted for much more than a month, if that. If you want to be on the safe side, apply within the first week.

There is huge variation in the length of time 2023 Fortune 500 job opportunities were available, ranging from less than a week to over a decade. Most of this variation is explained by statistical differences between employers, likely due to their different utilizations of evergreen job postings. Because of the ambiguity of evergreen postings, looking at how long job opportunities are commonly available is a safer bet. 2023 Fortune 500 job opportunities were already starting to be removed within the first week after being posted and, by 40 days, over half of them were gone.

METHODOLOGY

We utilized the same 2023 Fortune 500 dataset from the previous Spotlight with 5.5 million postings, or over a quarter of postings in the NLx in 2023. Please review the Methodology section there for information on how the dataset was compiled and information about the sample.

Posting time is defined as the number of days between the date the posting was first included in the NLx (date_acquired) and the date the posting expired (expired_date). Postings expire in the NLx after they no longer appear in any of the NLx sources for four days in a row – at this point, the expired date is back-dated three days. There are just over eighty-eight thousand Fortune 500 postings from 2023 (approximately 1.5%) that had not expired as of September 1, 2024. Because it is impossible to determine exactly how long it will be until they expire, these postings were considered available for more than a year in this analysis. For the majority of those (83%), that was already true as of September 1, 2024 (i.e., they were posted before September 1, 2023). A rare scenario to note is that some employers might remove a posting for a time and then re-open the same posting. In that case, we consider this new posting the same as the original posting as long as it has been entered under the same job ID. If the employer is using the same job ID to post multiple iterations of an opening, we would try to capture that as an evergreen posting in this analysis.

The majority of this analysis is based on simple means, medians, and percentages. We also conducted a Shapley decomposition of the model’s R2 on the contributions of state, occupation group, and employer to time posted. A dominance analysis also confirmed that employer completely dominates occupation group, which in turn, completely dominates state in predicting time posted.

Author: Marissa Hashizume, National Labor Exchange Research Hub