Finding B2B Buying Signals in Job Posts and Company News

Yananai A. Chiwuta — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:10:58 +0000

Using job posts and company news without pretending every hire is purchase intent.

This week I’ve been working on a new tool for prospect research. The problem that I’m solving is that job posts on their own don’t give you enough information to know when a new job post is actually worth looking into further.

New jobs in operational areas could be routine replacement but if the job description talks about opening a new market or building a team or replacing a system then it’s worth looking into further.

To solve this problem I’ve been building a small app, Buying Window Signal Scorer, for our team at Forma Nôrden. The tool uses SearchApi’s Google Jobs API to pull in a list of relevant jobs and then it uses the Google News API to pull in relevant news items for the employers that make the shortlist.

Disclosure: SearchApi sponsored the project and supplied API credits. Forma Nôrden built the app and scoring rules.

I stopped treating "hiring" as the signal

But why is that useful to me?

Well, it depends on what “why” is. If I’m a recruiter, the “why” might be that this is the first person they’re hiring or that they’re building out a new team. If I’m an implementation partner, maybe they just hired a new leader who’s tasked with replacing an old system. If I’m a logistics vendor, perhaps this person will be tasked with opening a new facility or market.

In my app, I’ve created several different (and editable) firmographic profiles, including, but not limited to: Growth, Team Buildout, New Leadership and Revenue Operations. These profiles change not only the jobs I search for, but also the phrases I look for in the job descriptions, the types of company events I look for, and the weights I assign to each.

This is important because there are a lot of reasons why someone might want to research a company, and I think it’s foolish to assume that there’s a “one size fits all” for what I’ll call “intent.”

I use scoring, but only as a way to prioritize what I read.

Using my growth profile as an example (shown below), I can assign up to 40 points if I find a job that matches both the role and the description of the job. I can assign up to 20 points based on how recently that job was posted. I can assign 25 points if I find an item in the company news that matches one of my events AND has a date. And I can assign 15 points if I have two qualified sources with the same employer.

If I find a recent job posting with a strong-match title at a company, I give it a score of 45, which is enough to send it into my queue for me to read, but not enough for me to assume they’re ready to buy.

Lastly, in order for a company news item to give points, the headline must include the name of the company (that matches my event phrases). If the name of the company is in the excerpt only, I don’t give any points. This is handled cautiously for companies with short names (one word).

Now, this isn’t terribly exciting stuff, but it is important.

The live run did not produce a perfect story

In a run on 28 Sep 2026 with a company limit of three,

The job search part made two requests to the Google Jobs API and found 19 relevant and de-duplicated job listings. Of these, 3 employers were chosen and three further requests were made to the Google News API. In total, five SearchAPI requests were made, of which none failed.

Each of the three accounts scored 45 points for having recently posted jobs matching the profile’s titles. None of the accounts scored any points from the news search.

And I’m happy to leave it there!

You can find the code, tests, sample data and this note (by date) in the GitHub repo.

How I would use it in practice

I would probably start by setting up a very specific profile that only covers a specific market you’re interested in, or maybe even a short list of companies you’re already interested in. Run the app and then read the top sources before exporting the results. For each account, I’d save:

• Why the new responsibility or change in the company is of interest to you

• The URL and date of the source document

• The name of the employer, if mentioned in the source document

• Why you think this is important to your offer

• A question you have you'd like answered

What else do you need to know about each account?

You can find the app on GitHub under the MIT license. You can run the app against the fictional sample data provided without needing an API key, or get a SearchApi key and run Jobs and News against your own profile. SearchApi currently lists 100 free requests on signup.

DEV Community: Yananai A. Chiwuta

Finding B2B Buying Signals in Job Posts and Company News

I stopped treating "hiring" as the signal

I use scoring, but only as a way to prioritize what I read.

The live run did not produce a perfect story

How I would use it in practice