---
id: M-006
type: mechanism
title: "Stale or Orphaned Job Requisition"
lang: en
registry: 2026.08.2
canonical: https://hoba.work/mechanisms/M-006
json: https://hoba.work/api/v1/mechanisms/M-006.json
---

# Stale or Orphaned Job Requisition

Job posting remains active on careers page and aggregator portals despite the team having ceased active hiring or closed headcount.

> **On the canonical path** — [Published with its terms on the page](https://hoba.work/process#WF-003-published)
>
> The posting states the compensation band, the location rules, the stages the process has and roughly how long each takes. It comes down when the search ends.
>
> This entry is one of the ways that commitment stops being kept.

## At a glance

- Actor: system
- Nature: void
- Visibility: opaque
- Agency zone: none
- Evidence: established

## What it looks like

Composite excerpts, written to be typical rather than copied. No particular message, company or person is quoted here.

**Asking whether the role is alive** — *reconstruction*

```
  day 0 Candidate  I applied for this in January and again in March — is the posting current?
> day 2 Recruiter  Let me check. That team stopped hiring in December; the listing should have come down. I will get it removed.
```

*What to notice* The posting was not bait and it was not a decision. It was a record nobody owned, which is a different thing to be angry at.

## From each side

The same entry from inside each position that meets it: what reaches them, what it means from there, and what happens next given what they control.

### Employer policy

- **What reaches them:** A requisition moved to paused or unfunded in the budget ledger.
- **What it means from there:** Pausing an approved requisition keeps the option to restart it, and the approval costs nothing while it sits.
- **What happens next:** Records the change where budgets are recorded. Taking a public listing down is a separate action in a separate system, and the budget decision does not trigger it.

### ATS vendor

- **What reaches them:** A posting record in an active state, and applications arriving against it.
- **What it means from there:** The state of the record is a customer-owned field. Nothing distinguishes a running search from a record no one has closed.
- **What happens next:** Keeps rendering and syndicating the posting and accepting applications, and closes the unreviewed ones when the expiry default reaches its threshold.

### Recruiter

- **What reaches them:** The requisition list as the platform holds it, in which a listing no longer being worked looks like any other.
- **What it means from there:** Whether a search is still running is a fact held by the team that stopped, not by the funnel.
- **What happens next:** Answers directly and has the listing removed once the question arrives. A requisition with no search behind it does not enter time-to-fill, which is what is counted.

### Candidate

- **What reaches them:** A posting visible on the careers page and on aggregators, and no reply after submission.
- **What it means from there:** Silence is the same artifact whether a record was left open or an application was read and set aside.
- **What happens next:** Asks directly whether the posting is current, which is the only channel that returns the state of the record, and keeps the date of each submission.

## What this observation does NOT establish

- Application silence does not reflect candidate suitability.

## Related entries

- operates at — [B-013](https://hoba.work/barriers/B-013) — Requisition Approval & Public Posting
- operates at — [B-001](https://hoba.work/barriers/B-001) — Application Ingestion
- operates at — [B-002](https://hoba.work/barriers/B-002) — Automated Filter & Parser Threshold
- operates at — [B-003](https://hoba.work/barriers/B-003) — Inbound Screening & Triage
- emits — [A-001](https://hoba.work/artifacts/A-001) — Complete silence after submission
- emits — [A-004](https://hoba.work/artifacts/A-004) — Materially similar role reposted shortly after rejection
- amplifies — [M-020](https://hoba.work/mechanisms/M-020) — Automated Application Expiration Timeout

---

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