Is the job market bad right now? What live job postings can and cannot tell you

If you are asking this because your applications are going nowhere, the short version is at the top and it is honest: the answer depends on your function and your city more than on the calendar, and the loudest sources have the least data. The rest of this post shows what live job postings can say about the market this month, what they cannot say, and how to get the cut that applies to you.

Is the job market bad right now?

For some functions and cities, yes; for others, no, and no single number settles it. The official answer comes from unemployment and openings statistics. Live postings add a different view: how concentrated openings are, how fast they close, and how many state pay. Those shares are below, and they describe this month, not a trend.

One thing this post will not do is tell you the market is better or worse than last year. The corpus behind these numbers holds about three months of depth and its board mix shifts week to week, so a year-over-year comparison from it would be fiction. The Labour Market Pulse archives a snapshot every month; once the archive is deep enough, that is where the comparison will live.

What the postings say this month

The first two numbers are the same fact from both ends: 77.7% of open postings sit at the 13.4% of employers hiring ten or more roles at once. That concentration is why the market can feel closed and open at the same time. If you are applying to single-opening employers, which are 41.5% of all employers with a posting, you are competing for a small share of the openings.

How fast postings close is the second cut. The median days live and the share closed within 30 days differ by board, and the first thing they reflect is how a closure is detected, not who posts there.

Read the median with the detection mechanism in mind. On Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Y Combinator and Paylocity, JobsPipe checks each posting continuously and records the removal when the employer takes it down, so the median there reflects fill or withdrawal. On LinkedIn and Indeed a closure is detected when the listing reaches its 30-day expiry, so the median there sits at the expiry and measures the board’s listing rule rather than the employer’s decision. Compare boards within a group, not across the two.

The third cut is pay transparency. A posting that states a salary is one you can evaluate before applying, and the share that do varies by board more than by anything else.

Why does the job market feel so bad?

Because the parts of it a job seeker touches are the parts that have degraded: postings that stay up for months without a hire, descriptions too thin to judge, and no salary. None of those is the same as fewer jobs, and each one is measurable.

• Long-open postings. Every posting JobsPipe returns carries a ghost_score and a discovered_at date. Filter with max_ghost_score and you stop applying to requisitions that have been open since spring.
• Concentration. When most openings belong to a small set of employers, the average applicant sees the same few companies everywhere and concludes nobody else is hiring. The single-opening employers are there; they are just quiet.
• Thin and repeated postings. Aggregators republish the same requisition under several titles and locations, so the feed looks bigger than the market and every application feels like one of hundreds.
• No pay stated. On most boards the majority of postings state no salary, so applicants spend interviews discovering a number the employer already knew.

When will the job market get better?

Postings cannot forecast. What they can show is the leading edge: the share of established employers that opened their first posting in a function this month. A company that has not posted an engineering role in months and does so now is a hiring decision made after the budget meeting, and that share is the closest thing in this data to a turn.

Watch those shares month to month on the Pulse, next to the official openings series, and you will see a turn before the headlines do. What you should not do is read this month’s value alone as good or bad: it has no baseline yet.

What this data cannot tell you

• Year-over-year change. The corpus is about three months deep and its crawl mix changes. No trend claims are made here, and none should be inferred.
• Hires. A closed posting is a removed advertisement, not a hire. closed_reason says how it left the board.
• Applications. Nothing here measures competition per role. The applicant_count field is populated only where a board publishes it.
• The whole market. Ten boards are collected. Employers on other ATS platforms, in staffing-only channels, or hiring by referral are invisible here.
• Survey measures. Unemployment, participation and quits come from household and establishment surveys, covered in the labour market data sources guide. Postings complement them; they do not replace them.

How to get the cut that applies to you

The market you are in is one occupation in one country, and that slice is one query. This pulls active software developer postings in the United States posted in the last 30 days with a stated salary and a low ghost score:

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "occupation_code_or": ["2512"],
    "job_country_code_or": ["US"],
    "status": "active",
    "posted_at_max_age_days": 30,
    "min_salary_usd": 1,
    "max_ghost_score": 25,
    "limit": 50
  }'

Swap the occupation code for yours from the ISCO-08 list, add job_location_or for a city, and page with cursor. The monthly aggregates, with a CSV, are on the Pulse; the wider set of cuts is under labour market insights.