Availability and hiring status

Two states

Looking for work, and not currently available. There is no third.

There used to be an "open to offers" in between, and it had identical consequences to "looking for work" everywhere in the product, so all it did was turn a switch into a decision.

What "not currently available" does

It is the inactive state, and it is one mechanism rather than several:

• your profile leaves the directory, the homepage and the taxonomy pages
• you stop appearing in a client's suggested talent
• you stop being counted in the skill, tool and industry totals
• applying to a job is refused, by name, before you have written an intro
• clients cannot start new conversations with you

Your URL keeps working. The page still renders, keeps its metadata, stays in the sitemap, and says in one line why you are not in the results somebody came from. Somebody who was sent your link is not left with a dead page.

Conversations you already have and applications you already sent are untouched.

The thirty-day rule

If you do not use the site for thirty days, your status flips to not available on its own, and you are told when it happens.

Thirty days because anything shorter punishes a normal job-search rhythm, and anything longer leaves ghost profiles in a hiring directory.

Signing in marks you active but deliberately does not restore your status: being here is a fact, being available is a claim, and only you can make the claim.

Coming back

One button on your dashboard restores exactly the status you had. It is on the overview because that is the recovery path; the status control itself is on your profile, where the rest of your claims are.

Last seen

Your profile shows roughly how recently you were here: today, this week, this month, or nothing at all. Deliberately a bucket rather than a timestamp: an exact last-seen is a surveillance-shaped number about somebody who is not being paid for the watching.