Turn job postings into hiring signals: one API for recruiters and sales

What does a hiring signals API return?

Each company you submit comes back as one record with the signal, the volume behind it, and the context you need to act. The signal is a boolean, has_active_postings, backed by active_jobs_by_site, which counts employer-verified postings on Indeed and ZipRecruiter from this run. The volume is active_jobs_total_by_site.zip_recruiter, the company's real open-posting total read from its ZipRecruiter employer page rather than a page-limited sample.

The context is a profile block: industry, employee band, revenue band, headquarters, founding year, employee rating, website and socials. A sample record for a human resources company in the actor README shows 17 Indeed postings, 21 ZipRecruiter postings, a live ZipRecruiter total of 593 and a 7.27 employee rating.

Nested under each record are the latest jobs, each with a posted_at timestamp (hour-precise on ZipRecruiter, day-precise on Indeed) and a separate reposted_at field where the employer bumped an old ad. Runs default to a 48-hour window and 50 jobs per company per board.

• has_active_postings: the yes/no hiring signal per company
• active_jobs_by_site: employer-verified posting counts for Indeed and ZipRecruiter
• active_jobs_total_by_site.zip_recruiter: the full live ZipRecruiter total, a hiring-volume number
• posted_last_48h_count: postings inside your recency window, default 48 hours
• latest_jobs: title, salary range, location, remote flag, posted_at, reposted_at and application URL

How do recruiters use hiring signals to find clients who are hiring?

Staffing and agency recruiters run their client and prospect list through companies mode each morning after the boards refresh. Any account whose posted_last_48h_count moves above zero enters the outreach queue with the job titles, salary ranges and locations attached, so the first line of the email names the role the hiring manager opened yesterday.

Repost detection matters more here than anywhere else. When an employer keeps bumping the same ad, the record keeps the original posting date and puts the bump in reposted_at, a reliable sign of a hard-to-fill role and a stronger staffing pitch than a new opening. The profile block handles qualification in the same pass.

At $0.0005 per record, a daily scan of 2,000 client companies costs $1 and returns the fresh roles alongside the signal, so there is no second enrichment step.

• Schedule companies mode daily and act on rows where posted_last_48h_count went positive
• Add the website after the name (Kelly Services | kellyservices.com) so common names match the right employer
• Use reposted_at to spot relisted roles, often the hardest to fill
• Qualify with industry, employee band, revenue band, HQ and rating from the same record
• Feed the flat job rows into a candidate-matching pipeline while the posting is hours old

How do sales teams turn hiring intent data into account scores?

Hiring is spend that has already been approved, which makes it one of the earliest buying signals visible from outside a company. A team opening five engineering roles is about to buy laptops, cloud capacity, licenses and services for them, and a rep who knows that this week is ahead of any announcement. The company scan turns a target account list into per-account intent built from live numbers.

The practical pattern is to map two fields into the CRM: the live ZipRecruiter total as a size-of-expansion field, and posted_last_48h_count as a velocity field. Sort by velocity for this week's outreach and by total for territory planning. Industry and revenue segmentation come from the same record.

Rescanning is cheap enough to do weekly. A 5,000-account list costs $2.50 per pass, so 13 weekly scans over a quarter come to $32.50.

• Score accounts by live ZipRecruiter total (size) and posted_last_48h_count (velocity)
• Route accounts whose count jumped week over week into a fresh sequence, not the generic cadence
• Use role titles as the hook: a first sales hire in a new region, or a cluster of platform roles
• Export CSV or call the dataset API and write both counts into custom intent fields

How do analysts build a companies-hiring dataset for competitive intel?

Analysts want a time series, not a snapshot. Schedule the same company list on Apify every week and each run writes a dated dataset with posting counts, live totals and the newest titles per competitor, so the week-over-week diff becomes the report. The guide to tracking competitor hiring covers the scheduling and diffing pattern in detail.

Keywords mode covers the market view. Up to 10 search terms per run return fresh postings across both boards with salary_min, salary_max, interval and currency, plus a per-term summary of totals by board and how many fell inside the window. That gives posting volume and pay ranges per role and region without a company list.

Profiles mode is the lightweight enrichment path: names in, industry, size, revenue, HQ, founding year and rating out, with no job feed attached.

• Companies mode on a weekly schedule produces a dated hiring time series per competitor
• Keywords mode: up to 10 terms per run, salary normalized to min, max, interval and currency
• Profiles mode: firmographics only, for fast enrichment of large lists
• Indeed supports country selection; ZipRecruiter covers the US and Canada
• Export JSON, CSV or Excel, or push each run to Make, Zapier or Google Sheets via webhooks

Questions, answered

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