A Correction: The 120-Character Job Posting Was Our Reading of It

Bars scaled to the largest value, 5,000

This chart is what WE hold, and that is now all it claims. A short bar means our pipeline captured little, which may be a feed limit, a summary field, or a page we failed to read. It is not a statement about what a candidate sees on the employer's site.

The pattern in the withdrawn rows: every one of them compares OUR copy against OUR copy and then draws a conclusion about the outside world. The rows that stand are the ones that only ever claimed to describe our corpus.

Source: Seeker job corpus, 257,534 active job postings, snapshot 2026-08-16. seekerscore.com/insights/how-much-a-posting-tells-you-2026

Correction, 2026-08-16

What this page claimed: 'JPMorgan Chase publishes a median of 120 characters through one feed and over 5,000 through another, in the same weeks,' and from that, 'How much a job posting tells you is decided by the board, not the employer.' What is true: the 120-character source is `jpmc.fa.oraclecloud.com`, JPMorgan's own Oracle-hosted careers portal. It is not a third-party job board, and a candidate who opens one of those URLs sees a full job posting. What our pipeline stored for one of them, in full, is a single sentence: 'As a Private Client Banker, you are the point of contact for a select group of Chase's clients as well as customers in the Branch.' That is a clean, complete summary sentence rather than a truncation, which is the signature of a short-description field being read instead of the body. The Apple comparison on this page fails the same way and is withdrawn with it.

Why we caught it this time

Because a reader had just caught us doing the identical thing with Apple's salaries a few hours earlier, and told us to stop treating our own corpus as source truth. The Apple case was: Apple publishes pay, our connector never read the block it lives in, and we published '1 of 4,948' as a fact about Apple. This case is: JPMorgan publishes a full description, our connector reads a summary field, and we published '41.7x' as a fact about job boards. Same shape, different field. The second one was found by applying the lesson from the first, which is the only reason this correction exists before the page had a chance to travel.

What stands, and it is not nothing

Every measurement on this page was accurate about our corpus. 9.5% of the postings we hold carry under 500 characters. oracle_cloud's median stored description really is 123 characters. adzuna really does deliver descriptions hard-capped at exactly 500, which is a visible property of that feed rather than an inference. And the counter-example set, which we reported at the time because it cut against our own thesis, has aged best of anything here: for 14 of the 18 employers where a median could be computed on two boards, the two agreed within 10%. Stripe, Twilio, GitLab, Salesforce and Reddit read the same everywhere. The honest version of this page is a description of what our pipeline captures, and that is genuinely useful, but it is a smaller claim than the one we made.

What this means if you are reading job postings

The practical advice survives the correction and gets stronger. A very short listing is not an employer telling you the job has no requirements. It is a listing that cannot contain them, and the full posting very likely exists somewhere else, frequently on the employer's own careers page. Go and read that one before you decide anything about pay, level or requirements. What changes is who to blame: we cannot tell you it is the job board's doing, because at least twice now the short version was on the employer's own site and the gap was introduced by the software reading it. Ours.

How we measured it (and what we did not claim)

Corpus figures come from a 20% systematic sample of 257,534 active postings on 2026-08-16, plus a full pass over employers with at least 40 active postings on two or more sources. The correction itself is not a corpus query: it is five JPMorgan URLs taken from our own corpus and opened directly, plus the stored text for one of them quoted in full above. Two limits stated plainly. First, we have not established for every short source whether the shortness is a feed limit, a summary field, or a page our scraper handles badly, so we describe the effect and not the cause. Second, our own storage caps descriptions at 5,000 characters, so the long end of every distribution here is censored and this page still publishes no claim about which source is most thorough. We are NOT claiming job boards carry full text faithfully, and we are NOT claiming employers write short postings. We are claiming, now, only what we can support: this is what our corpus holds, and where we have checked, it holds less than the source did.

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