How City Jobs Counts Jobs: Sources, Freshness, Limits

City Jobs pulls listings from two kinds of sources. The first is employer careers systems: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, and Recruitee. These are the platforms companies use to run their own hiring, so a listing there means the employer itself published it. We read those feeds directly. The second is USAJOBS, the federal government's official hiring site, which covers federal roles across the country.

Some employers also post directly on City Jobs, which is free. Those listings get a Verified badge, which means the posting was reviewed before it went live. Verified posts sit alongside the aggregated listings and count the same way in our totals.

What we don't do: scrape other job boards, buy listing dumps from resellers, or republish ads of unknown origin. If a listing can't be traced to the employer or the federal feed, it doesn't go up. Click apply on an aggregated listing and you land on the employer's own application page, not a form we built.

A listing stays up exactly as long as it appears on the employer's own careers feed. When the company removes a job from its system, it comes down from City Jobs too, automatically. Nothing sits around for months collecting applications for a role that was filled in March.

This is the closest thing we have to a ghost-job filter, and it isn't perfect. An employer can leave a dead listing on its own careers page, and we'd carry it too, because we mirror their feed rather than guess at their intentions. But the most common kind of stale listing, the ad nobody bothered to take down on a third-party board, can't happen here by construction.

It also means our counts have a timestamp. The total moves as employers open and close roles, so a figure pulled Monday can differ from one pulled Thursday. When you cite a City Jobs number, note the date.

Pay on City Jobs comes from one place: the listing itself. When an employer publishes a range, we show it. When they don't, the listing shows no pay, because we never estimate and we never fill in a number the employer left out. Any pay figure you see here is advertised pay, not a survey of what workers in that city or field actually earn.

Coverage is uneven. A growing list of states requires posted salary ranges, including Colorado, California, Washington, New York, and Illinois, so listings from those states show pay more often. Elsewhere it's the employer's call. And since employers set their own ranges, posted numbers skew however employers want them to skew. Read advertised pay as a signal, not a measurement.

Our sample skews. Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, and Recruitee are heavily used by tech companies, startups, and mid-size firms with modern HR stacks. They're lighter on small local businesses, restaurants, construction crews, and retail chains running in-house systems. So a city's count here reflects what's listed in the systems we read, not the full labor market of that city. A town with 40 listings on City Jobs can easily have hundreds of open roles posted elsewhere or filled by word of mouth.

City counts also depend on how employers tag location. A remote role tagged to a company's Denver headquarters shows up in Denver even if the hire never sets foot in Colorado. We surface what the feed says.

Last, keep our numbers separate from government statistics. City Jobs counts advertised openings. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the actual workforce: unemployment, employment by occupation, real wages. They're different datasets answering different questions, and swapping one for the other is the easiest mistake to make with job-board data. Cite us as live listings on City Jobs as of a date, and you'll be accurate.