A job post is a client's listing on Upwork describing work to be done, with a budget or hourly range, the skills and experience wanted and any screening questions, to which freelancers and agencies reply with proposals.
A client writes a job post with a title, a description, a job category and skill tags, a type (hourly or fixed-price) with a project budget or rate range, an experience level, an expected duration and, optionally, screening questions. The client also chooses who can see it: public to everyone, invite-only, or visible only to Upwork's talent services. Upwork reviews posts against its Terms of Service before they go live and removes those that break them, which is one of the cases where Connects are refunded.
Alongside the post, freelancers see a panel about the client: whether the payment method is verified, total spend, number of hires, hire rate, average rate paid and country. Experienced freelancers read that panel before the description, because it says whether the client actually hires.
Posts expire after a period Upwork sets unless the client closes them earlier, and the band showing how many proposals have arrived updates as they come in. A post is not a contract and a budget is not an offer; the client is free to hire at a different price, more than one person or nobody at all, and most posts end without a hire. Reading the client panel, the proposal count and the budget together is how a freelancer decides whether the Connects are worth spending.
How Upwork Insights uses it
This term describes Upwork's own rules or product rather than a figure the index measures; the pages that do carry live figures are the stats and rate pages.