What a Competitor's Job Postings Tell You About Their Plans

A company can keep a new product or a move into a new market quiet for months. What it can't easily hide is that it's hiring for it. Job listings go up long before the launch, the press release or the new pricing page, which makes them one of the earliest public signs of where a competitor is heading.

Where do you find all of a competitor's job listings?

Start with their careers page. Most growing software companies don't list jobs by hand; they use a job board such as Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, and the careers page either links to it or embeds it. Follow that link and you'll usually find every open role in one place, with the team and location for each. That's far more complete than whatever they choose to post on LinkedIn.

Which hiring signals actually mean something?

• A first role in a new region. A “Head of Sales, Germany” or a first account executive in London usually means they're about to push into that market.
• Enterprise sales and sales engineers. A run of these means they're chasing bigger customers with longer, more technical sales. Expect an enterprise plan and security features to follow.
• Security and compliance hires. Often a sign they're preparing for certifications or selling into regulated industries.
• Several roles in one team at once. Five new engineers on one product area says more than one hire anywhere.
• Roles quietly disappearing. A team that stops hiring, or roles that close without new ones, can mean a project has been shelved or budgets are tightening.

How do you avoid reading too much into it?

Job boards are noisy. Some roles stay open all year as a standing pipeline, some get closed and reposted so they look fresh, and plenty are simply replacing someone who left. A single listing proves very little. What matters is change over a few weeks: which teams are growing, what's new, and what's gone. It also helps to put hiring next to their other moves. Enterprise sales hires plus a new security page plus a pricing change is a story. Enterprise sales hires on their own are a hint.

How often should you check?

Weekly is enough by hand. The totals don't matter much; what you want is the list of roles that appeared and disappeared since last time. If you're keeping notes, write down new roles by team and location, and anything that closed. After a couple of months, the pattern usually speaks for itself. For a wider view of what else to keep an eye on, see what to track and how often.

How Rival Radar tracks this

When you watch a competitor's careers page, Rival Radar looks for a Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby job board linked from that page (it never guesses one from the company name) and reads it once a day. You see open roles by team, which roles are new in the last 30 days and how many closed. A role only counts as closed after it's been missing from two daily checks in a row, so a glitchy day on their job board can't make it look like they've stopped hiring. If they don't use one of those boards, it says so, and you still hear about changes to the careers page itself.

Read next