A hiring signal is a job posting read as a buying signal.

What is a hiring signal?

A hiring signal is a new job posting interpreted as evidence of what a company is about to buy. The posting names the function, seniority, location and often the tools, and it was published by the company itself after headcount and budget were approved. That makes it a declarative buying signal rather than an inferred one.

The difference from other intent categories is timing. Content intent fires when someone at the account reads about your category; review intent fires when they shortlist. Both happen after the team that does the reading exists. A hiring signal fires when that team is being built, which is why it leads the other two by a quarter or more in most categories. The trade is that it only covers things a company hires for. The glossary entry on hiring-signal intent goes deeper on the comparison.

The posting patterns that predict a purchase

Five patterns account for most of what sales teams build on hiring data. Each card names the filters that express it and the share of hiring companies that show it, measured across the ten boards JobsPipe collects.

How common are these signals?

Rarity decides whether a pattern is a trigger or a filter. The single most common pattern is a company with one opening, so a posting on its own says little; three or more open engineering roles is rare enough to carry a play by itself. These are the base rates to read every signal against.

How to query hiring signals

Three requests cover the account-list, the market-scan and the burst-detection cases. All hit POST /v1/jobs/search, return the same record shape, and cost one credit per job returned. The sandbox at /v1/sandbox/jobs/search takes the same body with no key and answers with sample records.

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "company_name_or": ["Ramp", "Mercury", "Linear"],
    "discovered_at_gte": "2026-09-08 00:00:00",
    "limit": 100
  }'

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "job_title_or": ["sales development representative", "business development representative", "account executive"],
    "job_seniority_or": ["entry", "mid"],
    "max_employee_count": 200,
    "posted_at_max_age_days": 14,
    "limit": 50
  }'

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "job_title_or": ["software engineer", "backend engineer", "platform engineer", "site reliability engineer"],
    "isic_division_or": ["62"],
    "min_employee_count": 200,
    "posted_at_max_age_days": 30,
    "limit": 100
  }'

Every record carries job_title, company, company_domain, seniority, job_function, date_posted, discovered_at, technology_slugs and a company_object with headcount and location where known. That is enough to route the account into a CRM with the evidence attached. A posting that names a competitor’s product is a displacement signal; pair description_or with the tech stack scanner to confirm what the company runs.

What is headcount growth and how to read it from postings

Headcount growth is the change in a company’s employee count over a period, usually expressed as a rate. It is a lagging measure: by the time a profile database shows the new employees, they have been hired, onboarded and have updated their profiles. Job postings show the same growth as intent, before it happens, because a company cannot grow headcount without first opening the roles.

Reading it well takes one division. Open roles on their own reward size: the 13.4% of hiring companies with ten or more openings produce 77.7% of active postings, so a list sorted by posting count is a list of large employers. Divide open roles by the company_object.employee_count field and the ranking changes: a twenty-person company with four openings is planning to grow by a fifth, and a five-thousand-person company with forty is replacing attrition.

Two cautions. Size data covers roughly half the corpus, and the employee-count filters exclude unknown sizes by default, so a growth ratio is only computable where headcount is known. And postings measure plans, not outcomes: a role that closes with a closed_reason of stale or gone was a plan that changed, which is a signal of its own.

Signals and Workflows

This page is about running the queries yourself. If you would rather save a search once and be told when a new company matches it, Signals is the managed version of the same filters: new matches arrive by email, as a Slack message, or on a signed webhook, instantly or as a daily digest. Email works on every plan, Slack and webhook delivery on paid plans.

Workflows is the front door to Signals for people who would rather describe the watch than build it. You write a sentence, the builder checks the volume, proposes the filters plus an AI-judged intent, and one click creates the watch. For the categories of change that hiring surfaces first and the ones it does not, see sales trigger events ranked by how early postings show them, and for the wider list of posting patterns with their shares, buying signals from job postings.

Autobound and Signalbase sell the workflow around a signal: scoring it, routing it, and putting it in front of a rep with a drafted message. If what you want is a finished sales motion they are the better purchase. JobsPipe sells the layer underneath, for teams building their own scoring or feeding an agent. The category map, including where hiring signals sit against content intent and technographics, is in the intent data providers comparison.

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