What a job ad nobody has filled in two months is really telling you
An unfilled role is a company saying out loud that it cannot solve a problem. Here is how to read one, and what to do about it.
A job posting is a budget with a description attached
Companies do not advertise roles for fun. Posting one costs money, takes approval, and creates work for whoever has to sift the applicants. By the time an ad is live, somebody senior has already agreed that this work is worth paying a salary for. The ad itself is a public, dated, itemised description of a problem the business has decided it will spend money to fix.
That is already more information than most people ever get about a prospective client. You do not have to guess whether they have budget, whether they feel the pain, or who owns it. It is written down.
The interesting part is the ones that stay open
A role filled in three weeks tells you very little. A role still open after six or eight weeks tells you something specific and quite valuable: they cannot hire for it. Either the salary does not match the market, the skill combination is unusual, the location is awkward, or the work is unpleasant enough that good candidates keep saying no.
Whatever the reason, the problem has not gone away while they have been failing to hire. It has been getting worse for two months, and somebody internally is absorbing the work in the meantime and is tired of it.
Why the "open for 60 days" number is hard to get
Job boards show you a posting date, and postings get refreshed. A listing that says "posted 3 days ago" may have been running since spring; re-posting is routine, and it resets the only date most people ever see.
The only reliable way to know how long a role has genuinely been open is to have been watching it. Not to look it up afterwards, but to have recorded the first time it appeared and to keep checking that it is still there. That is an observation, and unlike a fact it cannot be retrieved later. If you were not watching in June, no amount of searching in August will tell you what June looked like.
What to actually do with one
Do not pitch a replacement for the role. You are not going to talk a company out of hiring, and suggesting it makes you sound like you did not read the ad.
Pitch the specific piece of the job that is hurting right now. If the ad lists "reconcile invoices against the supplier portal" among nine other duties, that one line is a job somebody is doing badly at 6pm on a Friday. Offer to take that, for a fixed fee, this month, while they carry on hiring. It is small, it is concrete, it does not compete with the search, and it can start on Monday.
Address it to the person the role reports to, not to HR. HR owns the vacancy; the manager owns the problem, and working out which is which is most of the work of getting a reply.