I spent a week assuming my scraper was fine. Then a sanity check told me 0% of Greenhouse postings were older than six months, which is not a thing that happens on a real job board.

The culprit was one field. And it is not exotic — if you have ever scraped a job feed, you have probably made the same mistake.

The mistake is updated_at

Our Greenhouse connector read:

postedAt = row . get ( " updated_at " ) or row . get ( " created_at " )

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That reads fine. It is wrong twice over. First, the Greenhouse board API does not return created_at for a job, so the fallback never fires. Second — and this is the part that matters — updated_at is when a recruiter last touched the requisition , not when the job went live.

Here is what that does to real data. Account Executive, AI Native came back with a recent updated_at . Its actual first_published is 2024-12-20 . A req opened in 2024 and edited yesterday looks one day old.

The fix is one line:

postedAt = ( row .…