How to find old job postings

What is old job postings and why using it

Old job postings are outdated job offers who has been closed, fulfilled and ultimately no longer available on the job boards.

Expired job postings are part of the recruitment history of a company.

There are plenty of use cases where historical job data can be useful, especially for lead generation using hiring intent:

• Understanding and Predicting HR Needs to identify hiring patterns and trends.
• Analyzing old job postings provides insights into a company’s evolution and growth.
• Mapping Technology Usage in the Market: examining technical requirements in past job postings maps technology adoption and prevalence.

In this article we are going to see the different options you have to retrieve old job postings.

Find old job postings

From the job board itself

Once a job posting is published on the job board, it will be saved for a very long time. But as job boards often make you pay to display the job ads, as soon as you stop to pay, or if the position is fulfilled, the job won't display through the job board search engine. Even if job is still saved in their database.

However if you have the database ID of a job posting, you will be able to find it by building the right URL.

Let's have an exemple from Indeed with this job postings.

As you can see the job is expired now since several years (published in 2021), but you can still access it.

The job id here is "bae93e0be0cf33a4"

You can notice the job URL is using this id to access the job:

https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?vjs=3&jk=bae93e0be0cf33a4

If you have saved the job id, you can still access it for several month after it has been removed from the search engine.

However, the obvious limit of this method is that you will need the right id to access an old job posting.

Based only on a job title and a job location, you won't be able to access the recruitment history from the job board.

Use Mantiks to find companies recruitment history

Mantiks is a platform collecting and saving job postings from various job boards as linkedin, indeed, glassdoor, ... To track companies recruitment both actual but also historical jobs, in order to monitor business opportunities in the job market at scale.

Using Mantiks search engine, you will be able to access expired job postings from several years of historical data, based on a job title, location or even keywords to match in the job description.

The first step is to sign up (free) and create a new report:

Then you will be able to search historical jobs based on your targeting criteria.

Let's run an example on:

• Companies recruiting Sales
• Mentioning Salesforce in their job postings
• With a published date set on the last 12 months

Plenty companies are matching these criterias, let's open BentoBox by clicking on the company to have more details about its recruitment history:

As you can see on this sample we can access several month of historical data, which is quite interesting to see:

• BentoBox recruited sales on several locations
• There are different periods of time on wich they published job postings
  • 9 months ago
  • Then 4 month ago

Perhaps they will launch now another wave of sales recruiting!

Finally to extract this data on a excel or csv file, you have to launch a report by choosing if you want to enrich the company and jobs found with decision makers contact details.

If you want to get a whole dataset of historical job data, Mantiks can also provide full dataset for several years of recruitment history.

Conclusion

Finding historical job data is quite relevant to understand companies context - could it be about HR needs, but also company evolution or even mapping the tech usage - and of course identify recruitment trends.

This way you can outrun your competitor by positioning yourselves at the right time, with the right message.

Job boards aren't inclined to let you search through their history as most of the time companies are paying to display job offers.

You can still access expired job postings, but you will need to have the job id on the considered job board.

If you want to access easily the job market history, you can use Mantiks platform to find historical job data based on your targeting criteria.

Mantiks helps professional to leverage job data as hiring intent for sales and HR analytics purposes