DEV Community: eden

Hiring signals in Clay: which of your target accounts are hiring right now

eden — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:24:34 +0000

A company that is hiring for a role is usually about to buy what that role needs. A new "Head of RevOps" means a CRM project. Five open "Data Engineer" roles mean a data stack budget. That is why hiring is one of the most used buying signals in outbound.

Clay can run any Apify Actor as an enrichment, so you can add live job data to every row of an account list. This post shows two setups with two small pay-per-use Actors I built:

Your accounts are known. Get every open job, plus what changed since last week, from each company's own careers page.
Your accounts are not known yet. Search Google Jobs for a role in a city and get the companies hiring for it.

Setup 1: open jobs for each company in your table

The ATS Job Scraper takes a company domain, finds its job board (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters) and returns a one-row summary:

{
  "record_type": "company_summary",
  "company_domain": "linear.app",
  "total_active_jobs": 31,
  "new_jobs": 2,
  "new_job_titles": ["Senior Product Engineer", "Enterprise Account Executive"],
  "jobs_by_department": { "GTM": 15, "Product": 13, "Operations": 3 },
  "top_locations": { "North America": 19, "Europe": 8 },
  "top_technologies": { "React": 8, "TypeScript": 8 }
}

(Example of the output format.)

In Clay:

In your account table, click Add enrichment, search for Apify and pick Run Apify Actor.
Connect your Apify account (API token from the Apify console, Integrations page).
Choose the Actor hirepulse/ats-job-pulse.
Enter the input as JSON and insert your domain column as the value:

{
  "companies": ["<your Domain column>"],
  "output_mode": "summary_only"
}

Map total_active_jobs, jobs_by_department and new_job_titles into columns.

Now you can filter: "has 3+ open sales roles", "opened an engineering role this month", "hires in Europe".

Cost: $0.05 per company found. Companies whose job board cannot be found are free. 500 accounts cost at most $25.

Weekly changes: add "track_diff": true and a fixed "state_id". Each run then reports new_jobs and closed_jobs since the previous run with the same state_id, which is the real signal: a company that just started hiring.

Setup 2: find companies hiring for a role

The Google Jobs Scraper searches Google Jobs, which collects listings from LinkedIn, Indeed and company career sites:

{
  "queries": ["revops manager", "salesforce administrator"],
  "country": "US",
  "location": "Austin,Texas",
  "max_jobs_per_query": 100
}

Each job comes back with company, title, location, salary (parsed into salary_min and salary_max when shown), posted_ago and apply_url. When the apply link is on a company job board such as Workday, the full description is included too.

Run it once from the Apify console or from Clay with a single-row table, then import the dataset into Clay (Clay can pull the results of an Apify Actor run as a source). De-duplicate on company, and you have a list of companies that need what you sell, in the city you cover.

Cost: $0.005 per search that returns jobs plus $0.001 per job. 200 jobs cost about $0.21.

Tips

Start with summary_only in Setup 1. One row per company keeps Clay credits and Apify costs low.
Filter by title in the Actor, not in Clay: "title_keywords": ["sales", "account executive"] returns only the jobs you care about.
You can test both on Apify's free plan before you commit. The Google Jobs Actor returns a 10-job preview there; full results need a paid Apify plan.

Limitations

Setup 1 works for companies that use one of the six supported job boards. Companies on Workday, iCIMS or Taleo, or with a custom careers site, come back as not found and are not charged.
Google Jobs results are what Google shows at search time; many listings are reposted on several boards, so de-duplicate by company and title.

Questions or a job board you need? Ask in the comments.

Google Jobs results as JSON, for $1 per 1,000 jobs (no proxies, no browser)

eden — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:40:13 +0000

Google Jobs is the best free job index on the web. It pulls listings from LinkedIn, Indeed, company career sites and hundreds of smaller boards into one search. What it does not have is an API.

The scrapers that fill that gap tend to break: they drive a browser through Google, get blocked, and you pay for failed runs. In October 2026 the most used one on the Apify Store failed 19% of its runs and charged $0.35 to $0.90 per 100 jobs, and another succeeded in only 1 of 500 runs in a month.

So I built one that does not scrape Google from a browser at all. It reads Google Jobs through a commercial search-data API, so there are no proxies to rotate and nothing to break. This post shows how to use it.

What you get per job

You send one or more searches and a country, optionally a city. You get one record per job:

{
  "query": "data engineer",
  "country": "US",
  "position": 1,
  "title": "Senior Data Engineer",
  "company": "Acme Corp",
  "location": "Austin, TX",
  "contract_type": "Full-time",
  "salary": "$140K–$180K a year",
  "salary_min": 140000,
  "salary_max": 180000,
  "salary_currency": "USD",
  "salary_period": "year",
  "posted_ago": "2 days ago",
  "source": "LinkedIn",
  "apply_url": "https://..."
}

(Example of the output format.)

What to expect from real data: in a test of 3 US searches (30 jobs), Google showed a salary on 5 of the 30 jobs. Many apply links go straight to the company's own career site. When the apply link is on a company job board (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby), the record also includes the full job description; in a test of 79 US jobs that was 16 of them. Other jobs keep the apply_url to the original posting.

Run it

The tool is the Google Jobs Scraper Actor on Apify.

From the console

Open the Actor, type your searches, pick a country, optionally a city such as Austin,Texas, and press Start. Results appear as a table you can export to CSV, Excel or JSON.

From curl

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/hirepulse~google-jobs-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries": ["data engineer"], "country": "US", "location": "Austin,Texas", "max_jobs_per_query": 50}'

From Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("hirepulse/google-jobs-scraper").call(run_input={
    "queries": ["account executive", "sales development representative"],
    "country": "GB",
    "employment_types": ["fulltime"],
})
for job in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(job["title"], "|", job["company"], "|", job.get("salary"))

From an AI agent

Add Apify's MCP server with this one tool to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=hirepulse/google-jobs-scraper

Then ask: "Which companies in Austin are hiring data engineers this week, and what do they pay?"

Pricing

$0.005 per search that returns jobs. Searches with no results are free.
$0.001 per job.
100 jobs from one search cost about $0.11.

You need an Apify account. You can try it on the free Apify plan: each free run returns the first 10 jobs of your first search. Full results need a paid Apify plan, because every search has a real data cost.

If you track specific companies rather than roles, the ATS Job Scraper reads every open job, with full descriptions, straight from a company's Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby or Workable board, and tells you what changed since the last run.