Sales teams pay a great deal for intent data: who visited your pricing page, who researched your category, who downloaded a competitor's whitepaper. It's inferred, probabilistic, and expensive.
Meanwhile, companies publish an explicit, dated, public statement of what they intend to do next. It's called a job posting, and almost nobody in sales is reading it systematically.
What a job posting actually tells you
A company posting a role has already done the hard part internally. Someone wrote a business case. Someone approved headcount. Finance allocated budget. That process takes weeks and it does not happen for a team that is standing still.
So the posting tells you, with far more confidence than a page visit:
- There is budget. Headcount is the hardest spend to approve.
- There is a gap. They are hiring for a capability they don't have enough of.
- There is a timeline. Roles get posted when the work is already waiting.
- There is an owner. The hiring manager is your buyer, or reports to them.
Read the role and you learn the shape of the problem. A company hiring its first data engineer has a data problem it has decided to stop tolerating. One hiring three sales development reps is about to need sales tooling, enablement content and probably a CRM cleanup. One hiring a compliance officer just entered a regulated market.
Volume and seniority carry the signal
One posting is noise. The pattern is signal.
Volume tells you the scale of the initiative. A company with one open engineering role is backfilling. One with eleven is building something.
Seniority tells you whether it's new or routine. Senior and executive roles usually mean a new function is being created, not a seat being filled. When a company posts a VP of a function it didn't previously have, it has decided that function matters — and the person hired into it will spend budget in their first ninety days.
Momentum tells you the direction. Roles added since last month matter more than a stale list of everything open. A company that added six roles this week is in a different state from one that has had the same six open since March.
Combine them and you can rank a target list by how likely each account is to be actively spending. That's the whole idea behind a hiring-intent score: weight role volume, weight the seniority mix, weight the change since the last check, and sort.
The timing advantage is real
There is a window between a role appearing on a company's own careers page and that role becoming widely visible. During that window, the initiative is being planned rather than executed. That's when a vendor conversation is welcome, and it's the opposite of arriving after the tool has been chosen.
Checking weekly and diffing against last week's list turns this into a routine rather than a research project. New roles this week are your call list.
Three ways to get this wrong
Treating every posting as new. Companies repost roles they cannot fill. A "new" listing that has been reposted quarterly for two years is not a signal of momentum; it's a signal of a hard-to-fill role. Diff against your own previous scrapes rather than trusting a posted date.
Confusing titles with seniority. In banking and real estate, "Assistant Vice President" is an upper-mid individual contributor, not an executive. I built a classifier that got this wrong and my "executive hiring" numbers were inflated by a third until I read the underlying titles. If you rank accounts by executive hiring, be sure you know what an executive is in that industry.
Pitching the recruiter. The person named on the posting is in talent acquisition. They are not your buyer, they are measured on time-to-fill, and a sales email is friction in their week. Use the posting as evidence about the team, then find the team's leader.
The honest limitations
A job posting tells you a company is spending. It does not tell you they are dissatisfied with an incumbent, that your product fits, or that the timing is right for a purchase rather than a hire. Companies also post roles they never fill, post to benchmark salaries, and post to look like they're growing.
Treat it as the strongest freely available signal of budget and intent, not as a qualified lead. It gets you a well-timed, well-informed first sentence. The rest of selling is unchanged.
Doing it without a research team
I built a tracker that aggregates open roles per company, scores hiring intent from volume, seniority mix and week-over-week change, and flags which companies added roles since the last run. It outputs one row per company with the roles attached, so you can read the shape of what they're building.
Run it on a schedule against your target accounts and read the diff on Monday morning. That is the entire workflow.
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