How to see which companies are hiring right now (and what changed this week) from Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workday boards

How to monitor company hiring trends using job boards

The open roles of a company provide insights into where its focus may be heading. Adding enterprise sales positions in a new market, or shifting from design roles to compliance roles, indicates changes in strategy. You don't need a paid data service to analyze this information. Most tech companies list their job openings on hosted job boards like Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, or Workday. These boards are available as public JSON files, allowing direct access to the company's career page data.

This post explains three steps to monitor company hiring:

1. How to read job boards using a simple script

2. A weekly check of which companies are hiring and what changes have occurred

3. Automating the process to run weekly and send results to Slack or a Google Sheet

Job boards return public JSON data. For example, to check the current open jobs at Greenhouse, use this command:

curl -s https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/vercel/jobs

The job board URLs are usually in the form of job-boards.<company>.greenhouse.io or jobs.<company>.com. The board name appears in the URL and can be found on the company's careers page.

The key insight isn't just the number of open jobs, but the changes over time. The following Python script (Python 3.11 or later) compares the job listings from a week ago with the current data:

```python

import json, sys, urllib.request

from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone

slug = sys.argv[1] # e.g., vercel

url = f"https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/{slug}/jobs"

jobs = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(url))["jobs"]

week_ago = datetime.now(timezone.utc) - timedelta(days=7)

recent = [j for j in jobs if datetime.fromisoformat(j["first_published"]) >= week_ago]

print(f"{slug}: {len(jobs)} open jobs, {len(recent)} first published in the last 7 days")

```

Run this script weekly using cron and you'll have a basic hiring monitor for one company. To track multiple companies, modify the script to loop through a list of company domains and run the checks for each.

Challenges arise when monitoring multiple companies. Identifying the correct job board can be tricky, as the URL may not match the company name directly. Additionally, job board APIs use different date formats, and Workday requires pagination to retrieve all job listings. Keeping track of team-level data, such as the number of sales or engineering roles, requires mapping job titles to specific functions and seniority levels.

Using an actor like the Company Hiring Tracker on Apify simplifies this process. This actor handles the complexities of different job boards, date formats, and pagination. By running the actor weekly, you can generate a report highlighting companies that have added or removed roles, allowing you to stay informed about hiring trends in the tech industry.