Picture a candidate who saved a job on Monday and meant to apply on Friday. Thursday morning, an email reminds them it closes tomorrow, and they apply. Or the deadline slips past anyway, they click an old link a week later, and land on a page that says the job has closed and offers three open roles instead of an error.
Both moments are one feature seen from the candidate’s side. WP Career Board sends a reminder at three days and again at one day to people who saved a job and have not applied. Once the job ends, its page stays up with a plain notice and a short list of similar open jobs. Both are in the free plugin.
Written for the person who runs the board, this post follows the candidate. What do they get, when, and what does it mean for the way you set the board up? The one setting that decides whether any of this happens on a site that was installed before version 1.8.0 gets covered as well.
The reminder: what a candidate actually receives
A candidate saves a job with the Save job button. It sits in the Saved jobs list of their dashboard, and that is the only thing they have to do.
Once a day, a scheduled task looks for published jobs whose deadline is exactly three days away, then exactly one day away. For each of those jobs, it finds the people who saved it and checks who has already applied. Everyone who saved it and has not applied gets one email. Everyone else is left alone.
Short on purpose, the email carries the subject “Application deadline approaching for” followed by the job title. The body says the application window closes on a date, says how many days are left and has one button that reads Apply now. You can rewrite the subject and the body in the plugin’s email settings, using merge tags for the job title, company name, days left, deadline date and job link.
No candidate gets a reminder twice. The plugin records that it sent the three-day reminder for that job to that person, so a task that runs twice in a day does not send twice. Anyone who saved the job and applied before the first reminder gets nothing, which is the right outcome: nobody wants a nag about a form they already sent.
What counts as a “saved” job
Saving is a bookmark, and it belongs to a signed-in candidate account. Because the reminder depends on it, be clear about that with your own users. A visitor who is not signed in has no list to save to, so they never get a reminder. When most of your traffic arrives from search and leaves again, few reminders go out.
That is a useful thing to know about your own board. A reminder is a retention tool for people who already showed interest. Finding new candidates is not its job. The way to get more people saving jobs is the same as the way to get more people registering: make the account worth having, and ask for it at the moment a job looks interesting.
Reminders also only cover jobs that are still published. A job the employer has already closed by hand does not trigger one, and neither does a job with no deadline, since there is no date to count down to.
Candidates can switch it off
Candidates can opt out of this email. In the candidate dashboard, the Account section has an Email Notifications panel with a checkbox for each optional email. Application Deadline Reminder is one of them. Unticking it stops the email for that candidate, and no one else is affected.
Emails about the account, applications and payments are always sent, as the panel also notes, and only the optional ones can be turned off. That split matters when a candidate complains about “too much email”. Point them to that panel and the problem is theirs to fix in ten seconds, with no ticket to you.
To see it work on your own site, give a test job a deadline three days from today, save it from a candidate account and wait for the next daily run.
The employer hears about it too
The three-day mark does a second job: on the same daily pass, the plugin also tells the employer that the job ends soon, once per deadline. This gives them a chance to extend it while it is still live, rather than discovering on the morning after that it has gone.
Each warning is recorded against the deadline it was sent for. If the employer extends the job to a new date, they are warned again when that new date comes within three days. Leave the job untouched, and the employer gets one warning and no more.
From the candidate’s side this matters indirectly. When the employer extends a job because the warning arrived, it is still open when the reminder says it closes tomorrow. The two emails work from the same calendar, so they do not contradict each other unless someone changes the date between them.
When the job ends, the page stays
Now the other half. After the deadline passes, an hourly check moves the job out of the live listings. The closing day itself still counts as open, and the job ends the day after. From then on the job stops taking applications and drops out of the listings, the feeds and the sitemap.
The page does not disappear. Anyone who follows the old address sees the job as it was, with a notice at the top: either that the job has expired, or that it is closed and no longer taking applications, depending on how it ended. With the apply form gone, nobody writes a cover letter for a role that has gone.
There are two ways a job can end, and the plugin keeps them apart. Passing its deadline marks a job expired. An employer closing it by hand marks it closed. Candidates see slightly different wording for each. For you as the board owner, the useful difference is that expired jobs came off the board by the clock, and closed jobs came off because a person decided to.
Similar jobs, not a dead end
The second thing the ended page does is more important: under the notice, it shows up to three open jobs. The plugin looks for jobs in the same category first, then fills any gap with the latest open roles. Only jobs that are still accepting applications are offered, so the list never points at another dead page.
Think about who lands there: someone followed a link a friend sent, or opened a saved job after a week away, or clicked an old email. They arrived wanting that role, and it is gone. In most job boards that visit is a loss. Here it carries on: the person is already on your site, already interested in this kind of work, and one click from a role that is open.
Be realistic about the number. Up to three show, and fewer when the board has fewer open roles in that category. This is not a recommendation engine, and it does not learn from behaviour. It is a sensible default that turns a dead end into a next step, and that is all it needs to be.
What it does not do for search
Reading “the page still loads” as “the page still earns traffic” is tempting, but it does not, and the plugin is not trying to. An ended job page tells search engines not to index it, while still letting them follow its links. The job also leaves the sitemap, deliberately: an old job that keeps ranking sends people to a role they cannot apply for, and Google asks job sites to remove expired postings.
So where does the value of a closed page come from? It comes from the people who reach it some other way. A shared link keeps working. A saved job still opens. An old email still leads somewhere. And the similar jobs list gives each of those visits somewhere to go.
The guide to job posting schema covers the search side of the story, including what markup an open job carries and why an ended one loses it. Read it for the markup. For how ending works, rely on this post and the listing expiry feature page instead.
The setting that decides whether any of this happens
This part catches site owners out. Ending jobs at their deadline is controlled by a setting called deadline auto close. A new installation from version 1.8.0 onward has it on. A site upgraded from an earlier version has it off.
This is on purpose, so that an upgrade does not suddenly pull a backlog of old jobs off a live board. But it means that on an upgraded site, jobs past their deadline stay in the listings, keeping their place, and the ended page and its similar jobs list are never reached through the normal flow.
This does not affect reminders, which look forward from today, so they run on every site whether or not auto close is on. What changes is what happens at the deadline.
To switch it on, go to Settings, then Jobs, then Default listing length. When the board still lists jobs past their deadline, you will see a notice saying so and a button called End jobs at their deadline. Clicking it turns the setting on and schedules a run straight away, so you do not wait for the next hourly pass.
Think before you click on a board with a long history, because the first run moves every job that is already past its deadline, up to 200 at a time, and keeps going until the backlog is clear. Employers only get an expiry email for jobs that ended in the last week, so you will not email people about listings from last spring. Even so, the sensible time to do it is a quiet morning, not the day of a launch.
Limits worth knowing before you promise anything
Here are a few honest edges, so you can describe the feature accurately to the people who use your board.
- Reminders cover 500 jobs per bucket each day. The daily task reads up to 500 jobs for the three-day mark and 500 for the one-day mark, and it does not page through more. Test that on a board with more than 500 jobs ending on the same date before relying on it.
- Only two reminders exist. Three days out and one day out. There is no setting to change those numbers from the admin screen.
- Saved jobs only. A candidate who looked at a job but did not save it gets nothing.
- Three similar jobs at most. The ended page does not carry filters, pagination or a search box.
- No candidate gets a message when a job ends. The email goes to the employer. Candidates see the outcome the next time they open the page.
None of these is a flaw. Together they are the shape of a free feature that does one thing well. The aim here is that you know the edges before a user tests them for you.
How to set up a board that treats closing well
When you are building or tidying a board this week, a few choices make the difference between a feature that exists and one that works.
- Make sure every job has a deadline. The job forms fill in the default length for you, and you set it under Settings, Jobs. With no deadline saved, a job has no countdown, so it never gets a reminder or an ending.
- Check the auto close setting. On an upgraded site, decide whether to switch it on, and when.
- Read your own reminder email. Edit the subject and body so they sound like your board, not like a template.
- Test the ended page. Close a test job and open its link in a private window. Check that the notice reads well and that the similar jobs make sense for your categories.
- Mention saving in your onboarding. Tell new candidates they can save a job and get a reminder before it closes. Most will not discover it alone.
Want candidates to hear about new jobs rather than only closing ones? Pro adds saved-search alerts. The job alerts guide walks through them, and the pricing page shows what sits in each plan.
Why this is worth a few minutes of your time
A board is judged by what it does when things end. Jobs always end: they fill, they expire, they get withdrawn. A board that handles that moment well feels trustworthy, and one that leaves stale roles online or throws errors feels abandoned.
Small as they are, the two halves reinforce each other. The reminder gives a candidate a nudge while the job is open. The ended page gives them somewhere to go when it is not. Neither one needs the employer to do anything extra, and neither needs you to run a campaign.
For the employer, the same plugin gives hiring teams private notes and a star rating on every application, which is a good companion once the candidates start applying on time. You can read that story in private hiring notes and a 1 to 5 rating for every applicant. Together, they cover what a candidate sees before and after the deadline, and what the team does with the applications that arrive.