Tracking days live for open job posts can help your hiring teams better understand how well your job posts are performing. It can tell you which ones need work and which ones can serve as positive examples for future job posts.
It measures the period of time that a job post is up on an internet job board where potential candidates can apply. Hiring teams can use this metric to gauge the impact of their job postings.
What days live is not
Some confusion exists between the days live and requisition days live metrics. Simply put, days live has nothing to do with the job requisition.
Requisition days open incorporates a host of variables that muddy the waters when it comes to assessing job posts. They include the time between getting the requisition live and getting the job post published. They also include any time after a hire when a requisition remains live in your applicant tracking system. Because requisition days open covers a longer period, the days live metric gets lost within the larger metric.
For evergreen jobs (jobs that hiring teams leave open because they hire for it repeatedly), the requisition is open-ended. Without an end, there’s no way to measure how long a single round of hiring took. In that case, any duration metric for the job post is lost altogether.
Recruiting teams that want to know how long it takes to fill a job from the day a requisition goes up can track the requisition. But that’s another metric.
Focus on job posts
The days live metric narrows in on the time a job post is live. Using that data, hiring teams can make tweaks to improve existing job posts. Recruiting leaders can use well performing job posts as examples and poorly performing job posts as cautionary tales.
By narrowing the window onto the time a job post remains online, you can shine a more focused light on job posts. This metric offers actionable data on your job posts without unrelated variables muddying the view.
Just be sure to keep your job posts online for at least 30 days. That’s enough time to see whether a job post is attracting enough qualified applicants. But it’s not so long that it skews the metric you’re trying to measure.
