The inactivity warning, in pictures

When a posting carries a Possibly inactive mark, the Details line links to a page explaining it. Most people arrive there with one question — why is this posting marked, and why is the warning not stronger — and until now the answer was two and a half thousand words of prose.

That page has been redrawn. Each of the four criteria now has a picture of what it actually looks at: the same job posted over and over with several copies live at once; a role found on an aggregator but missing from the company’s own careers page; applications that got no reply in the time their stage allows; reports from people who applied and heard nothing.

The part that was hardest to find is now a small table. There are two separate tests — did at least two criteria fire, and did at least two different people supply evidence — and the wording depends on how many pass. The table shows the strongest wording sitting in one corner, and that the posting itself can never get you there. That is the whole reason a staffing agency, which honestly has none of its clients’ roles on its own board, does not end up accused of anything.

The limits are still there, and still stated plainly: we only check careers pages we crawl, a quiet company is not a fake job, and nothing here can see what an employer meant to do. The full account behind each criterion is one click away rather than on the page at all times.