How long does a job advert stay online?

How old the adverts currently online are

Counted 7 September 2026 over 22,309 adverts with a usable posting date, 99% of the board. IMPORTANT: this is the age of adverts that are online NOW — not the average time an advert stays up. Any snapshot necessarily contains more long-lived adverts, because a role filled in four days never appears in one. Half have been up 33 days or longer.

What "still online" actually means

An advert does not disappear the moment someone suitable applies. In most organisations the posting runs until a contract is signed — and that can be weeks after the first interview. Between "online" and "open" sits a grey zone larger than the listing suggests.

That explains a substantial part of the older stock. When a good third of open adverts are more than 30 days old, three different cases sit inside that: roles that genuinely found nobody; roles where selection is already under way; and roles left online out of carelessness though they are filled.

You cannot see which is which, but the consequence is simple: an application in the first week after publication almost always meets an open process. Four weeks later the probability is markedly lower — not zero, but markedly lower.

So response time is the lever within your control. The difference between applying on day two and day twenty is larger than the difference between a good cover letter and a very good one.

Why trades roles stay open so long

At a median age of around 41 days, adverts in construction and the trades stay online more than twice as long as the market average. Electrical, plumbing, carpentry, assembly, installation, sheet metal — these firms are visibly searching longer than they would like.

The reason is not a shortage of postings but a shortage of applicants with the right training and sufficient German. Practically no trades role manages without a national language, and roughly seven in ten explicitly require German — in this field that is the harder hurdle, harder than the qualification.

Bring both and you are searching in the market with the most favourable ratio of open roles to applicants in the country. And because these employers are under pressure, willingness to train someone up or bend a requirement is greater here than elsewhere.

At the other end sits engineering at around 15 days, closely followed by commercial roles, retail and hospitality at about 16. Those fields are not less in demand — they fill faster, because more people are applying.

What an advert's age tells you

A fresh advert, less than a week old, is the normal case and needs no special interpretation — beyond being quick. About two thirds of all open roles were published within the last 30 days, so the market renews itself continuously.

An advert between four and eight weeks old in your own field deserves a second look. If your field's median is 16 days and this advert is six weeks old, the employer has a problem — and a problem is an opportunity.

An advert that reappears after some weeks is the clearest signal of all. A re-advertisement means the first attempt failed. That is exactly when an application that might have been too thin the first time becomes worth making.

And a very old advert with no re-posting — older than three months, which is roughly a sixth of the stock — is the one case where a short call before applying genuinely saves time. Asking whether the role is still open is entirely legitimate and is not read as a nuisance in Switzerland.

How to handle the short shelf life

The most important consequence is not about applying but about searching. If half the roles are less than three weeks old, the frequency of your search determines how much you see at all. Check once a month and you see a slice; have new adverts reported to you and you see everything.

Separate searching from applying while you do it. Scanning new adverts costs minutes and almost always pays; writing a tailored application costs twenty to forty minutes and pays only selectively. Mix the two and you do both worse.

If you are registered with the RAV, the short shelf life has a second consequence: save the advert the moment you apply. Evidence without the corresponding posting is hard to substantiate afterwards, and with a stock that renews every few weeks the advert is often gone by month end.

And do not be put off by an old advert. The probability it is still open falls with age — but it falls more slowly than the number of competitors who have given up on it.