Short answer: apply in the first week a job is up, ideally in the first few days. The day of the week matters much less than that, but if you want to know when new jobs appear, it is Wednesday and Tuesday.

This comes from the 324,634 open jobs we track on the careers pages of 10,630 companies that use Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, checked every day.

Which days companies post jobs

Of the 239,310 jobs posted in the last six months:

Day Share of new postings
Monday 16.5%
Tuesday 20.5%
Wednesday 20.9%
Thursday 20.1%
Friday 19.1%
Saturday 1.9%
Sunday 1.0%

Recruiters post in the middle of the week. Monday is quieter, probably because it goes to meetings and reviewing the applications that came in over the weekend. Weekends are almost empty: 2.9% of postings.

So if you check for new jobs once a week, Thursday or Friday catches most of that week’s postings while they are still fresh. If you check every day, you will see most new jobs on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

How long a job stays up

This is the number that matters more. We looked at every job that came down since 8 November and measured how long it had been up:

  • half of them were gone within 33 days
  • 33.0% closed within two weeks
  • 48.5% closed within a month
  • 20.3% stayed up for more than three months

A posting coming down does not always mean the job was filled, but it does mean the company stopped taking applications for it. A third of jobs give you less than two weeks. Recruiters also tend to start screening the first applicants while the ad is still collecting more, so a strong application on day three is read with more attention than the same application on day twenty.

Time of day

We don’t publish an hour-by-hour chart because the posting times we see are in UTC and the companies span many time zones, so any “post your application at 9:14 am” advice from this data would be made up. What we can say is that sending an application on a Sunday night is fine: it will be in the pile on Monday morning either way.

How to be early without refreshing job boards all day

Big job boards pick up a company’s posting hours or days after it appears on the company’s own site, and often show it as “reposted” later. Going to the source is faster.

  • ATS Jobs Search searches all 324,634 open jobs straight from company career pages. Set “first seen within days” to 1 and run it every morning to get only the jobs that appeared since yesterday, filtered by title, country, salary or remote.
  • If you would rather have them in a spreadsheet automatically, schedule the same search daily and send the rows to Google Sheets; the Actor page shows how.

How we counted

“Posted” is the date the employer published the job (Greenhouse’s first-published date, Lever’s creation date, Ashby’s published date). Weekdays are counted in UTC for jobs posted in the last 180 days. A job counts as closed when it disappears from its board; we have recorded closures since 2026-11-08. Numbers refresh monthly, last on 2026-11-15. A free monthly sample of the data is on Kaggle.