How current are job listings — and is the date shown on them accurate?

Three clocks, and the list shows you one

"Current" sounds like a single property and is in fact three moments being confused with one another. The first is the day the employer published the vacancy. The second is the moment that advert arrived in the list you are reading. The third is the only one you actually care about: whether the job is still going.

Only the first is displayed, and even that only as the advertiser's own claim. What sits in a results list is not a measured value but a field somebody filled in — at the employer, in the applicant system, or at the portal the vacancy travels through. Read that way, a posting date is an assertion rather than a finding.

The second moment can be measured, and the result is reassuring. Across our stock of open Swiss adverts, the gap between the publication date and the moment the advert is recorded runs to a median of about nine hours. 90% are recorded within a day, 92.8% within two days and 96.8% within a week. Only 0.3% carry no usable date at all.

The third moment is the hard one, because nobody writes it down. So rather than estimate it, we went and looked — and what that check found is the rest of this answer.

What 600 re-opened adverts showed

At the end of August we drew 600 Swiss adverts from our stock — 100 from each of six age bands, from published today to older than three months — and opened each stored application address once. At most six adverts per destination, so that no single site could drive the result.

95.8% of the addresses answered with a page at all. For 73.7% it was then possible to tell from outside whether the job was still there. Of those judgeable pages, 94.8% still showed the job; on 5.2% it was gone — as an error page, as an explicit "no longer advertised" notice, or because the link redirected to a general vacancy overview.

The single figure matters less than its slope across the age bands. In the second week after publication 2.2% were gone, in the first month 2.5%, in the second 2.8% and in the third 4.2%. Among adverts older than three months it was 11.8%. The share roughly quintuples — and yet even at the oldest end it stays a minority. A six-month-old advert is still, with well over four chances in five, exactly what it claims to be.

One result was not what we expected: the freshest band scored high too. That is not ageing, it is a different defect. In those cases the job had not been filled — the stored link led nowhere from the start, once to a clothing retailer's shop front, once to an error page, once to an application form that no longer recognised the case behind it. A dead advert on day one is a broken link, not a filled post.

And one limitation that is larger than the finding itself: these figures describe the checkable half of the market. What happens to the rest is the next section, and it is really the harder answer to the question.

A quarter of adverts cannot be checked from outside at all

For 26.3% of the adverts we opened, we could not establish whether the job was still there. The main reason is mundane and affects you in exactly the same way: those pages return a near-empty shell and assemble their content in the browser afterwards. Open them without a browser and there is nothing to read; open them with one and there is nothing to read until it has loaded.

The pages affected are, of all things, the large applicant systems that sit behind a great many corporate vacancies, plus a few career sites with a cookie wall in front of them. The remaining unresolved cases were addresses that did not answer, requests that timed out, and two sites that refused an automated visit.

This is not a technical footnote. It is the real answer to "how current". For roughly a quarter of Swiss vacancies, nobody outside the company can say whether the advert is still live — not a portal, not a search engine, not a language model, and not us either. Judging a list by whether it is "kept up to date" asks, for that part of the market, for something that is not possible in principle.

The practical rule that follows is uncomfortable but honest: the bigger the employer and the more professional its applicant system, the less the outside view tells you about the state of the vacancy. At a firm with a plain career page you can see immediately whether the job is still listed. At a corporate system you see a form.

The start date is required, the end date is optional

Why does almost every advert carry a publication date and almost none an expiry date? Because that is precisely the rule these pages are built to. Google asks job pages for a set of machine-readable properties and lists "datePosted" among the required ones — "the original date that employer posted the job". The end date, "validThrough", sits among the recommended properties, and the guidance says outright that if a job "never expires, or you do not know when the job will expire, do not include this property".

Our check shows both halves of that. Of the pages we opened, 47.5% carried such machine-readable data at all. Of those, 99.3% declared a start date — and only 45.4% an end date. Across every page that answered: 21.6% name an end date, 25.9% name only a start date, and 52.5% name no machine-readable date whatsoever.

Leaving an expired advert up is not permitted, merely tolerated. The guideline is blunt about it — "We don't allow expired job postings" — and asks publishers either to remove the page, or to set the end date to a value in the past, or to strip the machine-readable job data from it. Doing none of the three risks a manual action against the site.

We found exactly that case, though rarely: on three of the 124 pages that declared an end date, the date had already passed while the page was still answering — in one instance with an end date from the previous year. And one employer defeats every check going: on its career pages every advert declares 1 January 1970 as its publication date, the zero point of the computer clock. That is not an old advert, it is a missing value being served as a date.

Where the two dates disagree, the employer's page usually names the older one

The most revealing part of the check was comparing two dates that ought to mean the same thing: the publication date in the list, and the publication date on the employer's own page. Both could be read in 271 cases. Only 36.5% named the same calendar day. 23.6% were one to seven days apart, 16.2% eight to thirty days apart — and 23.2% more than thirty days apart.

The direction is not random. In 50.6% of all pairs the list carried the more recent date and the employer the older one; in only 12.5% was it the other way round. In the top tenth of disagreements, the list ran 73 days or more ahead of the date the employer states itself. The error almost always points the same way: an advert looks younger in the list than it is at the employer.

There are two unremarkable explanations, and for you they carry the same message. Either the advert is re-posted along the distribution route and then carries the date of that re-posting — the widespread practice of pushing older vacancies back to the top. Or the list dates the advert from the moment it first saw it, and the employer had published it earlier. Either way the older of the two dates is the more honest one.

This skew also explains a common experience: you apply to an advert published "yesterday" and get a rejection that reads as though the process had long since run its course. It had. The rejection was not fast; the date was young. How long adverts stay online overall, and how heavily the freshly published week is shaped by a handful of large advertisers, we answer separately — this page is about the reliability of the date itself.

If you are job-hunting in English, your adverts are the slowest to arrive

The one part of the question a job list actually controls is the second clock: the time between publication and appearing in the results. Across our stock the median is about nine hours, and 90% of adverts are recorded within a day. But that span is not the same for everyone, and the difference falls hardest on the group most likely to be reading this page in English.

By the language the advert is written in, the share recorded within one day runs: German 92.1%, French 89.4%, Italian 86.3%, English 82.2%. The tail is longest for English-language adverts too — one in ten takes more than nine days to appear. That is not a statement about English speakers but about where English adverts sit: disproportionately with international employers running large applicant systems, and adverts routed through an applicant system or a portal arrive within a day only 86.7% of the time, against 93.0% for adverts on the employer's own domain.

If you are moving to Switzerland, this has a practical consequence that has nothing to do with your permit. Searching only in English narrows you to the slowest-arriving and, as our other answers show, the smallest slice of the market. Searching the German, French or Italian job title alongside the English one is the single cheapest widening available — and "Stelleninserat", "offre d'emploi" and "annuncio di lavoro" are the words the adverts themselves use.

Geography matters less than language: 90.4% of adverts in German-speaking Switzerland are recorded within a day, 89.6% in French-speaking Switzerland and 78.0% in Ticino, the last on a narrow base of under three hundred adverts and to be read with care. And there is exactly one delay in the Swiss market with a legal rather than a technical cause: in occupations subject to the job-vacancy reporting duty, a vacancy may only be advertised elsewhere five working days after it appears in the protected area of Job-Room, the unemployment insurance portal. For that slice, every public list is deliberately five working days behind.

Four checks that together cost a minute

First: open the employer's own career page and look for the job title in their own list. It is the only check that actually proves anything, and it takes twenty seconds. If the job is not there any more it is gone, whatever the portal still displays.

Second: compare the two dates. If the employer's page names a date and it is older than the one in the list, the older one applies. On our check that is the more common case, and in nearly one pair in four the difference is more than a month.

Third: watch where the application link lands. If it drops you on a general vacancy overview, a home page or a form without the job, the advert is not "still there" — it is the remains of one. That accounted for a substantial share of the cases where the job had gone.

Fourth: do not read a missing end date as reassurance. More than half of adverts name none, and under the rule these pages are built to, a missing end date means one thing only — that nobody entered an expiry date.

A word on when to bother: these four checks belong before an application, not during a search. While you are scanning a list, scepticism costs more time than it saves. From the moment you put half an hour into a tailored dossier — in Switzerland that means a CV, a letter and your Arbeitszeugnisse, the employer references a Swiss application is expected to include — a minute of checking is the cheapest minute in the whole exercise.

Why Switzerland has no central register that could be current

Anyone arriving from a country with one dominant public employment portal underestimates how scattered the Swiss job market is. The application addresses behind our open adverts spread across more than two thousand distinct destinations. The ten most common cover 29.3% between them, the hundred most common 59.8% — and just under half of all destinations carry exactly one advert.

That is the structural reason "how current" has no single answer here. There is no point at which every vacancy converges and from which they could all be refreshed at once. Every list is an assembly of sources, and every assembly inherits the data quality of its sources — including the employer whose pages serve 1 January 1970.

There is an upside for you in that. This same fragmentation is why small firms with a single open vacancy never show up completely on any list — and why an application there lands in a far smaller pile than one sent to the advertisers who fill the date filter.

One more thing worth knowing if you are reading this from outside Switzerland: residence makes no difference to how current a list is. The same list is as fresh from Milan as it is from Bellinzona. What changes is which adverts you find, and that is decided by the language you search in — not by where you are sitting.