How the scores work

LAST UPDATED 9 SEPTEMBER 2026

Every number on an employer in Recede is a count of something, not an opinion about anyone. Nothing here is a review, nothing is submitted anonymously, and no employer can pay to change a score. This page exists so that any figure we publish can be argued with — if you think one is wrong, the last section tells you how to say so.

There are two different scores. They are not related.

Mixing these up is the most common misreading, so they are labelled separately everywhere they appear.

Score	What it measures	Where the data comes from
Openness	How much an employer tells you up front, before you apply	The employer's own job listings
Response	Whether they actually replied	Outcomes logged by people using Recede

An employer can score well on one and badly on the other. A company that states salary on every listing and then never answers anybody is exactly the case these two numbers exist to separate.

Openness, in full

Computed from listings we have collected from public job boards and company careers pages. No employer submits anything, and nobody's opinion is involved.

openness = 0.50 × pay_pct
          + 0.30 × (100 − stale_pct)
          + 0.20 × facts_pct
          then clamped to 0–100

Term	Definition	Measured over
pay_pct	Share of listings that state a salary or a range	Every listing ever observed
facts_pct	Share that state something checkable — years of experience required, contract type, whether equity is included	Every listing ever observed
stale_pct	Share still open after more than 60 days	Listings open right now
median_age_days	Age of the typical listing	Listings open right now

Why the two columns use different samples

What an employer is willing to state is a property of everything they publish, so pay and facts are measured across every listing we have ever seen from them. A role they posted last month is still evidence of how they write job adverts.

How fresh their board is can only be read from what is live. A closed listing goes on getting older after it closes, so counting retired roles as "stale" would penalise an employer for taking a filled job down — which is the behaviour this score ought to reward. Both denominators are shown on screen next to the score.

Weights, and why

Pay carries half of it because an unpriced listing is the single thing job seekers complain about most, and because it is the one piece of information that decides whether applying is worth anyone's time. Freshness is next, because applying to a three-year-old advert is time nobody gets back. The remaining fifth covers everything else a listing could have told you and did not.

When we refuse to score

Fewer than three observed listings. One listing that happens to state pay does not make a company transparent, and a percentage from a sample of one is not a measurement.
Nothing currently open. An employer with no live roles is not a choice anyone is about to make, so we publish nothing rather than a score that has gone cold.
No dated listings. Freshness cannot be computed without dates, and we would rather show nothing than guess.

Below the threshold, you get counts instead

Refusing to score is not the same as having nothing to say. Most employers in the catalogue have only one or two listings, and showing them as a blank would be silent about the majority of companies you could apply to today.

So those employers are described in counts, never rates — "their only listing states a salary", "none of their 2 listings state a salary". The sample is inside the sentence, so the figure cannot be mistaken for a percentage. No score is shown, and no percentage is even stored for them: leaving a 100 in the database would be a correct-looking number waiting to be displayed somewhere it should not be.

As of 9 September 2026: 452 employers carry an openness score, a further 801 carry counts without one, from 24,854 observed listings in total. An employer showing neither is one we have not observed enough of to describe at all — that is an absence of evidence, not a bad result.

Response, in full

Built only from outcomes people logged themselves: an application was sent on a date, and either a reply arrived or it did not. There is no scraping of anyone's inbox and no guessing.

An application counts only once the person confirms they actually sent it. Drafts are excluded, and the clock does not start until they confirm.
Employers with fewer than five logged applications are shown as provisional and are visually marked as such, because five outcomes is not yet a pattern.
Silence is reported as silence — "no reply after 47 days" — with the count and the elapsed time both stated. We do not translate it into a judgement about the company.

No employer can pay to change a score, and we do not sell anything to employers. There is no claim-your-profile product, no promoted placement, and no way to have a number removed by buying something. This costs us an obvious revenue line and it is the reason the numbers are worth reading.

What we do not do

No anonymous reviews. Nobody can type an opinion about a company into Recede. There is nothing to moderate because there is nothing subjective to submit.
No adjectives on scores. A score is a number with its inputs shown. We do not call employers good, bad, toxic or dishonest, and we do not infer intent — a company can go quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with the applicant.
No predictions. Openness does not forecast whether you will hear back. It reports what the employer has published, and that is all it claims.
No ranking of employers we cannot measure. An absent score means we do not have enough evidence, not that the employer scored badly.

Where the listings come from

Public job boards and employers' own careers pages — the same pages any person can open in a browser. We collect the listing text an employer chose to publish. We do not collect anything from behind a login, and we do not collect personal data about anyone at the employer.

If you think a number is wrong

Employers included. Every figure here is checkable, which means it is also correctable.

Email 7bshiup@gmail.com with the company name and which figure looks wrong.
We will re-run the calculation, show you the listings it was computed from, and correct it if the data was wrong.
If a listing has been miscollected — wrong company, duplicated, or long since withdrawn — tell us and it comes out of the sample.
A score you dislike but which is computed correctly stays up, and we will show you the working.

Changes to this page

If a weight, a threshold or a definition changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. The scores are only worth anything while the method behind them is public and stable.