How Mountain West Trades works

This page explains where our listings come from, how pay is shown, how license verification works and how we keep data current.

Where jobs come from

Listings come from two places only:

Direct posts. Employers list jobs on this site, themselves or through our team. These show the employer's name, the apply link or email they gave us, and the dates the listing runs.
Employer careers pages and public applicant-tracking feeds. Our crawler, MountainWestTradesBot, reads employers' own careers pages and public job-board feeds (such as Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workable). These listings say "Listed from [employer]'s careers page" and link to the employer's own apply page.

We do not copy listings from Indeed, ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, Google for Jobs or any other job aggregator. Any employer can have a crawled listing removed with a removal request; we act on requests within one week.

How pay is shown

We show pay only when the employer stated an actual figure or range.
We never estimate, average or round an employer's pay. If there is no pay, the listing says "Pay not posted."
For crawled listings, pay is read from the listing text as written. Automated tools may help classify a job's trade or level, but they are never used to produce a pay figure.
Colorado requires pay — a rate or a range — on job postings (Senate Bill 19-085), so our posting form requires a minimum and maximum for Colorado jobs. We encourage posted pay everywhere: listings with pay get more and better applicants.
Pay benchmarks on guides and landing pages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (BLS OEWS) and are labeled with the release they come from.

How license verification works

License verification is optional and only happens with the tradesperson's written consent.
We store the license state, type, number, status and the date we checked it. Nothing else.
A person on our team looks the license up in the issuing state's public license lookup and records the result.
A verified profile shows "License verified by Mountain West Trades on [date]." Nothing about a candidate is public unless they opt in.

How we keep data current

Every listing has an end date. Direct posts run for the period the employer bought; crawled listings expire after 30 days unless we see them again on the employer's site.
A crawled listing that disappears from the employer's site is marked expired within 24 hours.
Expired and filled listings are marked as such, drop out of search and our sitemaps, and stop carrying job-posting structured data.
License requirements and pay benchmarks are stored with their source and the date we last verified them, and that date is shown next to the fact.

Hiring counts

Our hiring counts are live listings on Mountain West Trades by trade and state, refreshed every hour and stored daily so they can be compared week to week. "New this week" means posted in the last 7 days. They count listings on this site, not every trades job in the region.

Search engines and sponsors

When a listing goes live or changes, we notify search engines (IndexNow, and Google's Indexing API for job postings). When it expires, fills or is removed, we tell them it's gone.
Sponsors (supply houses, tool brands, trade schools) can buy clearly labeled placements in the digest and on the site. Sponsors never affect which jobs are shown, their order, or any guide content.

Automated tools

We use AI tools in three places. They help sort crawled listings by trade and level, and low-confidence results are reviewed by a person. They help us research license requirements and pay figures from official sources: every fact on the site is stored with a link to its source and a quote from it, and shows the date it was last checked. And they help draft articles: a blog post is published only after an editor has read and approved it.

AI tools never set the pay shown on a job listing. That's the employer's figure, as posted.