--- title: "How to find old job postings: six ways that still work" description: "The Wayback Machine is the free route that still works, since Google retired its cache in 2024 and Bing removed cache links too." canonical: https://jobspipe.dev/blog/find-expired-job-postings date_published: 2026-02-05 date_modified: 2026-09-30 author: Dvir Atias --- # How to find old job postings: 6 ways to dig up an expired Indeed or LinkedIn listing The Wayback Machine is the free route that still works, since Google retired its cache in 2024 and Bing removed cache links too. On Indeed, open the saved viewjob URL in a browser and check My Jobs, because free posts are visible for up to 30 days. On LinkedIn, job posts cannot be deleted, only closed, so a saved link or your Applied tab usually still opens the listing. Whether you're prepping for an interview, comparing comp bands historically, or hunting for a posting that was taken down - here's how to find an old job posting anywhere, including expired listings on Indeed and closed job postings on LinkedIn, plus how long postings actually stay up by board. Job postings disappear all the time. Companies close roles, fill them, pause hiring, or pivot, and the listing comes down within days. If you are trying **to find an old job posting** after the fact, for interview prep, comp research, competitive analysis, or because you saved a link that now 404s, here are six practical ways to dig it up, ranked by how well they actually work in 2026, plus the data on how long postings stay up in the first place. ## How long do job postings stay up? Most job postings that close come down within a month. Across the boards JobsPipe tracks, 54.4% of postings closed in the last 60 days were live for 30 days or less, and only 3.8% closed within a week. The median runs from 8 days on Lever to 33 days on Y Combinator. | Board | Median days live | 75th percentile | Closed within 7 days | Closed within 30 days | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Lever | 8 days | 10 days | 43.8% | 93.0% | | Paylocity | 13 days | 14 days | 22.7% | 96.5% | | Ashby | 14 days | 33 days | 20.4% | 69.6% | | Greenhouse | 14 days | 36 days | 20.5% | 68.1% | | Indeed | 30 days | 35 days | 8.4% | 51.8% | | LinkedIn | 30 days | 36 days | <0.5% | 51.5% | | Y Combinator | 33 days | 47 days | 16.9% | 43.4% | Two things drive the spread, and one of them is measurement. On LinkedIn and Indeed, JobsPipe detects a closure when the listing reaches the end of its 30-day window rather than continuously, so the medians on those two boards sit at the window length and say little about when the employer actually stopped hiring; the share closed within a week is the honest early-close figure there. On the applicant tracking system boards, a posting is marked closed soon after the employer takes it down, so their medians reflect when recruiters really close roles: shorter, with longer tails. For those boards a second lens is survival, the share of a cohort first sighted 14 or 30 days ago that is still open. | Board | Still open after 14 days | Still open after 30 days | | --- | --- | --- | | Greenhouse | 35.0% | 27.1% | | Ashby | 71.6% | 69.5% | | Lever | 66.0% | 56.7% | | Y Combinator | 98.0% | 86.8% | | Paylocity | 100.0% | 13.7% | The full picture, including the reasons postings close, is on the [job posting lifespan page](https://jobspipe.dev/job-posting-lifespan). If a posting has been up far longer than its board’s median, it may not be an expired posting you are hunting but a [ghost job](https://jobspipe.dev/ghost-jobs) that never came down. Try it without a key ``` curl -d '{"limit":3}' https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search ``` Only `/v1/sandbox/*` needs no key. ## How to see when a job was posted The date a job board shows is what the board says, and boards re-date. The date that matters is the first time the posting was seen anywhere. By hand, search the exact title in quotes plus the company name and look at the earliest copy you can find on any board. That copy is usually closer to the truth than the “posted 2 days ago” label on the one you opened. In the JobsPipe API every record carries both dates. `date_posted` is the date the source claims. `discovered_at` is when JobsPipe first sighted the posting, and it does not move when the board re-dates. `last_seen_at` is the last time a recheck confirmed the posting live, and `verified_at` is the last time it was checked at all. To pull everything first sighted since your last run, filter on `discovered_at_gte`: ``` curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "company_name_partial_match_or": ["anthropic"], "discovered_at_gte": "2026-09-01 00:00:00", "status": "any", "limit": 25 }' ``` When `date_posted` is 30 or more days later than `discovered_at`, the posting has been re-dated, which is one of the signals behind the [ghost score](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/what-are-ghost-jobs). ## 1\. Google cache (mostly gone) Google retired the public cache feature in 2024. The `cache:` operator and the cache link in search results no longer work, and Microsoft removed cache links from Bing in December 2024 for the same stated reason. There is no mainstream search engine cache left to check. _Skip this one._ ## 2\. The Wayback Machine The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine ([web.archive.org](https://web.archive.org)) is the best free option. Paste the original job URL and check if it was archived. Hit-rate is high for popular companies, whose careers pages get crawled frequently, and low for niche and small employers. **Tip:** if you do not have the URL, use the wildcard form `https://web.archive.org/*/company.com/careers/*` to list every capture the archive holds under the careers root, then open the blue calendar dots, which mark captures that returned a 2nn response. Orange and red dots are errors and render as empty pages. ## 3\. LinkedIn (limited) If the job was cross-posted to LinkedIn, the LinkedIn listing often stays visible for weeks after the original goes down. Search LinkedIn’s job search for the title and company. The LinkedIn-specific routes are below. ## 4\. Google Jobs cards Google Jobs caches listings for some time after they expire from the source. Search Google for `"{job title}" {company name} site:jobs.google.com`. Sometimes the cached card shows up even when the original is gone. ## 5\. ATS-specific archives Some applicant tracking systems retain the page after the listing is removed. Greenhouse, for example, keeps the static page at its original URL with a “This job is no longer available” banner for months. If you saved the original `boards.greenhouse.io/{company}/jobs/{id}` URL, it may still resolve. Lever, Ashby, Workday and SmartRecruiters each keep the job at a stable, predictable path too. For which systems expose their postings openly, see [public versus gated ATS APIs](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/public-vs-gated-ats-apis). ## 6\. JobsPipe’s closed postings (most reliable) JobsPipe keeps the postings it has indexed for a rolling 12 months, including the parsed compensation, the full description and the original apply link, and a closed posting stays queryable. Set `status` to `closed` (or `any`) and filter by company, title or date range: ``` curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "company_name_partial_match_or": ["anthropic"], "status": "closed", "posted_at_gte": "2026-06-01", "limit": 25 }' ``` Each closed job carries `closed_at`, so you can tell when it came down, and a `closed_reason`: `closed` when the source said so, `gone` when the page disappeared, `stale` when it went unseen long enough to count as closed. Customers use this for benchmarking historical comp bands, tracking a competitor’s hiring cadence, and recovering a saved listing that 404’d. ## How to find expired job postings on Indeed Indeed is where most people lose a listing, because Indeed postings come down on a timer rather than when the role is filled. Indeed’s employer FAQ says free job posts are visible for up to 30 days in the US, Canada and most of Western Europe, and for up to 120 days in a second list of countries that includes India, Mexico and Japan. Sponsored Jobs stay visible for as long as they are sponsored. For the difference between closed, paused and timed out, see [what “closed or expired” means on an Indeed job posting](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/job-closed-or-expired-indeed). Here is the recovery order that works. ### Start with the exact Indeed URL you saved Indeed job pages live at `indeed.com/viewjob?jk={id}`, where `jk` is the stable job key. Indeed describes closing a post as something that “removes the listing from job seeker search results and archives it”, so leaving search does not always mean the URL is dead. Paste it into a normal browser tab. Do this from a browser, not a script: a scripted fetch of `/viewjob` gets a 403 from Indeed’s bot protection, which tells you nothing. ### Check your Indeed My Jobs history If you applied through Indeed, your application is the record. Open My Jobs and the Applied tab. Indeed’s help center says applications stop appearing there if you applied more than six months ago, and that older applications can still be reviewed through its Personal Data Request Form. That form is the most underused route on this list, because it is the only one that does not depend on someone else having archived anything. ### Read the search snippet, then try archive.ph Search `site:indeed.com "exact job title" "company name"` and read the snippet even if the link is dead; it often carries the title, location and the first line of the description. [archive.ph](https://archive.ph) is worth one attempt too, since it captures pages on user request rather than on a crawl schedule. ### Point the Wayback Machine at the careers page, not the Indeed URL Indeed’s robots.txt disallows `/viewjob?` for unnamed crawlers and carries a blanket disallow for `ia_archiver`, the Internet Archive’s crawler, so individual Indeed job pages are thinly archived. Aim at the employer’s careers root instead, as in method 2. If the listing is still live and you want to read it later, use Save Page Now on [archive.org/web](https://archive.org/web) against the employer’s own careers URL. ### Go to the employer’s careers site and search the title plus company Almost every Indeed listing is a mirror of a posting on the company’s applicant tracking system, and ATS URLs are far more durable than the Indeed copy. The fastest tell for which ATS a company runs is where the Apply button sends you. Then drop the `site:` filter and search the exact title in quotes plus the company name, because a role that expired on Indeed has usually been mirrored to [aggregator sites](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/job-aggregator-sites) that expire on different schedules. ## How to find old job postings on LinkedIn LinkedIn behaves almost the opposite way to Indeed. LinkedIn’s help center states that job posts cannot be deleted, only closed, so a closed LinkedIn job is a state change on a record that stays, which is why so many `linkedin.com/jobs/view/{id}` links keep resolving long after the role is gone. ### Open the saved LinkedIn job URL first, signed in A closed role often still renders with a “No longer accepting applications” notice where the apply button was, which is enough to recover the title, the company and usually the full description. Be signed in: LinkedIn serves a much thinner guest view and can bounce you to a sign-in wall, which reads like the posting is gone when it is not. ### Check Job tracker, then the Applied tab Click Jobs at the top of your homepage, then Job tracker in the left rail, then the Applied tab. LinkedIn’s help center says that after you apply for a job on LinkedIn you can view it again at any time, and it publishes no retention window on that list. The Saved tab in the same place holds anything you bookmarked. Depending on your client the area is labeled Job tracker, My Jobs or My Items. ### If you posted the job, the Closed tab has it Click the Jobs icon, then Manage job posts, then the Closed tab, then the job title. LinkedIn says that when jobs expire you can still view the post and reach the applicant list through the old listing. One quirk: that tab sorts by creation date, not closing date. Two timing rules explain most of what you find there: a job post stays open until you close it or until it automatically closes after 6 months, and a free post is paused after 14 days unless promoted. Wayback is a long shot for LinkedIn, whose robots.txt disallows every crawler it has not named; if you try, search the exact job URL, since Wayback indexes by URL, and otherwise aim at the company careers page as above. ## Checking liveness programmatically, at scale The flip side of finding an old posting is knowing the moment a live one closes. The DIY route is a tiered checker: query the underlying ATS feed where one exists (Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby expose public board JSON, so “is this ID still in the feed” is a clean boolean), fall back to HTTP status (404 or 410 means gone, but watch for soft-404 redirects to the careers homepage), then JSON-LD `validThrough`, then per-board tombstone text. Model the result as live, closed or unknown, never as a binary. A timeout is not a closed job. Or skip building the checker. JobsPipe tracks posting lifecycle as part of collection on the boards it collects, so every record carries `status`, `last_seen_at`, `verified_at`, and `closed_at` with a `closed_reason` when the posting comes down. For one URL, the checker on the [ghost jobs page](https://jobspipe.dev/ghost-jobs) returns the same fields without a key. For the record shape, hit the no-key sandbox at `POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search`. For the data you get back when reconstructing hiring history across many companies, see [what a job postings dataset contains](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/job-postings-dataset). ## Sources - [Indeed employer FAQ (free post visibility)](https://www.indeed.com/hire/resources/howtohub/faq) - [Indeed help: My Jobs, managing applied jobs](https://www.indeed.com/help/job-seekers/articles/4412589551757-my-jobs-managing-applied-jobs) - [LinkedIn Help: close a job post](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a518551) - [LinkedIn Help: access your closed job posts](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a520455/access-your-closed-job-posts-on-linkedin) - [Internet Archive Wayback Machine availability API](https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How long do job postings stay up? Most closing postings come down within a month. Across the boards JobsPipe tracks, 54.4% of postings closed in the last 60 days were live for 30 days or less and only 3.8% closed within a week. Medians by board run from 8 days on Lever to 33 days on Y Combinator. On LinkedIn and Indeed the median sits at the 30-day listing window because closures there are detected at expiry rather than continuously. ### How do I see when a job was actually posted? The board's date is what the board claims, and boards re-date. Search the exact title plus company and find the earliest copy on any board. In the JobsPipe API, date\_posted is the claimed date and discovered\_at is when JobsPipe first sighted the posting, which does not move when the board re-dates. ### How do I find expired job postings on Indeed? Try the saved indeed.com/viewjob?jk= link first, because Indeed describes closing a post as removing it from search results and archiving it, so the URL is not always dead. If you applied through Indeed, open My Jobs and the Applied tab, which shows the last six months and can be extended through Indeed's Personal Data Request Form. Then go to the employer's careers page and applicant tracking system, which usually hosts the original the Indeed listing was mirroring. ### How long do job postings stay up on Indeed before they expire? Indeed's employer FAQ says free job posts are visible for up to 30 days in the US, Canada and most of Western Europe, and up to 120 days in a second list of countries. Sponsored Jobs stay visible for as long as they are sponsored. In JobsPipe's data the median Indeed posting that closed in the last 60 days was live for 30 days. ### How do I find old job postings on LinkedIn? Start with the job URL, because LinkedIn's help center states that job posts cannot be deleted, only closed, so a linkedin.com/jobs/view/ link often still resolves. If you applied through LinkedIn, click Jobs, then Job tracker, then the Applied tab. If you posted the job, click Jobs, then Manage job posts, then the Closed tab. Wayback coverage of LinkedIn job pages is thin because LinkedIn's robots.txt disallows unnamed crawlers. ### Can you still view a closed job posting on LinkedIn? Usually yes. A closed listing often still renders at its original linkedin.com/jobs/view/ URL with a No longer accepting applications notice in place of the apply button. Sign in before you try, because the logged-out guest view is much thinner and can look like the posting is gone. ### How do I find an old job posting if I never saved the link? Search the exact job title in quotes plus the company name with no site filter, since the same role is usually mirrored across several boards that expire on different schedules. Then check the employer's own careers page and applicant tracking system. As a free last resort, put the company careers URL into the Wayback Machine using the web.archive.org/\*/company.com/careers/\* wildcard form and open the blue calendar dots first. ### Does Google cache still work for finding expired job listings? No. Google retired the public cache feature in 2024 and Microsoft removed cache links from Bing in December 2024. Google Jobs cards are a partial substitute, because Google Jobs caches listings for some time after they expire from the source. ### Is there an API for historical or archived job postings? Yes. JobsPipe keeps the postings it has indexed for a rolling 12 months, including parsed compensation, the full description and the original apply link. Set status to closed or any on POST /v1/jobs/search and filter by company, title or date range. Each closed job carries closed\_at and a closed\_reason of closed, gone or stale. Free tier included. Related ## Keep reading - [Guide · Sep 9, 2026Where Can I Find My Job Description?](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/where-can-i-find-my-job-description) - [Reference · Sep 9, 2026Ghost jobs by job board: share of ghost-like postings on LinkedIn, Indeed, Workday, Greenhouse and six more](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/ghost-jobs-by-job-board) - [Guide · Jul 25, 2026What "job closed or expired" means on Indeed (and what to do about it)](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/job-closed-or-expired-indeed) - [Comparison · Jun 27, 2026Where to get job posting data in 2026: 7 sources compared](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/where-to-get-job-posting-data) - [Reference · Jul 27, 2026Job ads, job postings, vacancies: the vocabulary of job ad data, explained](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/job-ads) ## Further reading - [How long do job postings stay up on Indeed?](https://jobspipe.dev/answers/how-long-do-job-postings-stay-up-on-indeed) --- Try it with no key: `curl -d '{"limit":3}' https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search`. AI agents: the full machine-readable index of this site is https://jobspipe.dev/llms.txt?src=md-twin - API quickstart, MCP server, pricing. Free key (1,000 jobs to start): https://jobspipe.dev/signup