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Old job postings are outdated job offers who has been closed, fulfilled and ultimately no longer available on the job boards.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

Expired jobs 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 job 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.

Therefore you have two options:

• Scraping jobs continually and save at least the job id to access them later.
• Use job scraping platform to access companies' recruitment history.

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.

Create a free account

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

Access companies recruitment history

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!

Extract companies and jobs data

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 (not mandatory).

Once your report launched you will receive it by mail on excel or csv format. The file will like to following screenshot:

Use a Webhook to get job data programmatically

You might want to get expired job data not on an excel or csv format but directly on JSON to integrate it to your information system.

In this case, we recommend to use our webook who will send the data to the given URL you will specify.

To enable the webhook, go to report page and click on menu "webhook" then enable it.

You just have to place the url on which you want the webhook to send the information - see the screenshot below:

Find old job offers for a specific company

In the last section we saw how to browse recruitment history starting from targeting criteria, like companies recruiting sales.

But you might want to directly access the recruitment history for a given list of companies to consult old job postings.

In this case, the best way to do so is to use Mantiks enrichment API:

• Input :
  • Company website
  • Keywords to match inside the job title or job description
  • Publication date
• Output
  • The list of jobs matching your criteria for your specific company given in input.

Use Mantiks job dataset

Another option to access old and expired job listings is to use job dataset.

Job dataset is a listing of previous and current jobs who have been published on Job Boards, structured into a csv file. You will find information like:

• Company name
• Job title
• Job description
• Job location
• Job publication date

And plenty other data points to exploit the job data as needed.

Mantiks is among the best provider of job dataset, gathering every day all job postings from various job boards like: indeed, linkedin jobs, glassdoor, ...

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 competitors by positioning yourself 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