How to Use Job Postings for Competitive Intelligence

A job advert looks like a formality and is in fact a specification with a budget behind it. Somebody approved the headcount, somebody wrote down the tools the person will use, somebody decided the level and the band, and somebody described what success looks like in the first quarter. All of that is published, dated, free, and written about a company that may otherwise disclose nothing at all.

What it does not contain is outcomes. An advert is evidence of intent at the moment it was written and nothing more: a large share of open roles are never filled, and a large share of filled roles never produce the thing the advert implied. Reading adverts as a forecast is the fastest way to make this source unreliable. Reading them as a company stating, under commercial pressure to be accurate, what it currently runs and currently lacks is what makes it one of the strongest free sources available.

1. 1Get the complete set of adverts before reading any of them. External job sites carry a filtered subset, because posting to each one is a separate paid decision. The full list lives on the hiring system the company uses, which you reach from any apply button on their own careers page. Bookmark that address once and every future pass starts from a complete set.
2. 2Read the about-us paragraph first, and save it with the date. The boilerplate at the top of every advert is written by marketing and changed rarely, which makes it a dated snapshot of how the company describes itself. Save it verbatim. The version six months from now, compared with this one, is a positioning change with a timestamp attached and no announcement.
3. 3Pull the named tools and systems into a list rather than reading them as prose. Requirements sections name databases, cloud platforms, analytics products, customer systems and compliance frameworks by brand. Extract every proper noun into a flat list per advert. Across ten adverts, the names that recur are what they run, and the ones that appear only in the newest adverts are what they are adding.
4. 4Read the requirements against the responsibilities and find the gap. The responsibilities describe work the company wants done. The requirements describe the person they think can do it. Where those two disagree, something is being changed rather than continued: a role asked to build a function it also requires five years of experience running is a function they do not currently have.
5. 5Take the pay band from whichever jurisdiction discloses it. Disclosure rules attach to where the role is located, so a company hiring the same title in several places often publishes a range in one advert and none in the others. That published band is the company's own view of the role's worth, and it applies to the role rather than to the postcode.
6. 6Write down what the role will be measured on. Adverts increasingly state the outcome: pipeline in a named segment, retention in a named region, latency, activation rate, time to value. That sentence is a competitor telling you which number their leadership is currently unhappy with, and it is far more specific than anything in their marketing.
7. 7Diff the same title against the version from six months ago. One advert is a description. The same title read twice is a direction. Changes in the named tools, the level, the band, the location and the boilerplate are all individually small and collectively a strategy statement, and archived copies of a careers page make the comparison possible even for roles that closed.

Every document a company puts into public has an audience and a penalty for getting it wrong, and those two things together decide how specific it ends up. On almost everything a company publishes, vagueness is free and often deliberate. On a job advert it is expensive, and that single asymmetry is why this source works.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it reframes what this source is for. When a competitor’s marketing says they are enterprise-ready and their engineering advert asks for experience with a particular compliance regime and a named data platform, the advert is the more reliable of the two documents. Not because the company is being more honest in one than the other, but because the advert has to be true enough to attract a person who will find out on their first day.

Every advert opens with two or three sentences describing the company. Almost everybody skips them, and they are one of the most useful artefacts on the page. That paragraph is written by marketing rather than by a recruiter, it is pasted unchanged into every advert the company runs, and it is updated only when somebody decides the description is wrong. It is, in other words, a positioning statement with a date on it, published dozens of times a year, for free.

Four things to record from it, in this order:

• The category word. What noun do they use for what they sell? A company that described itself as a reporting tool and now describes itself as a platform has made a decision, and the advert dates it.
• The customer noun. Who do they say they serve? A shift from teams to organisations, or from marketers to revenue leaders, is a segment move stated in public before any pricing page reflects it.
• The proof point. Which number or logo do they lead with? Companies pick the strongest one they have, so a change here usually means the previous proof point stopped being the strongest.
• The scale claim. Customer counts, headcount, funding and geography turn up in this paragraph more readily than anywhere else on a private company’s website, because recruiting rewards sounding substantial.

Pay disclosure has changed this source materially in the last few years, and the way it changed is more useful than it first appears. The obligation attaches to where the role is located rather than to where the company is, and a growing list of US states now requires a good-faith range in the advert itself, with Europe moving the same way at very uneven speed.

That creates an opening. A company hiring the same title in a disclosing jurisdiction and in two others publishes a band once, and that band is the company’s own view of what the role is worth. It is a statement about the level, not about the postcode. Adjust for local cost if you must, but the structure it reveals travels.

Two cautions. A published range is a good-faith range under a legal obligation, not an offer, and the eventual offer is rarely at the top of it. And equity, which is frequently the larger part of the package at earlier-stage companies, is almost never in the advert, so a band read on its own systematically understates what senior people are actually paid.

1. The job title and level

Read it against the rest of the company. A title that exists nowhere else in their organisation is a new function, and new functions are decisions rather than vacancies. Levels matter as much: a company replacing a manager with a director in the same team is raising the ambition for that area, and a company hiring three of the same title at once is building rather than maintaining.

2. The about-us boilerplate

Covered in full above. The single instruction that matters is to save it verbatim with a date every time you do a pass, because its value is entirely in the comparison and it cannot be reconstructed afterwards once the template changes.

3. The responsibilities section

This is the company describing work it believes is currently not being done. Read it as a gap list. Phrases like establish, build out, define and stand up mark things that do not yet exist, which is a different and more useful signal than maintain or support. A responsibilities list full of establishing verbs is a function being created, and that usually shows up in their product or their go-to-market a couple of quarters later.

4. The requirements section

The densest part of the document and the reason engineering adverts are worth reading even if you never hire an engineer. Databases, cloud providers, warehouses, queues, customer platforms, analytics products and compliance frameworks are all named because the wrong applicants are expensive. Extract every proper noun. Names that recur across adverts are what they run; names that appear only in the newest adverts are what they are adding, and that distinction is visible only if you keep the previous list.

5. The reporting line and team description

Who the role reports to, how big the team is, and which function owns the work. Three or four adverts across different departments produce a usable sketch of an org chart that nobody published. The most informative version is a role whose reporting line has moved: a designer reporting into product rather than marketing, or an enablement role reporting into revenue operations, is a structural decision with consequences for how they will behave in deals.

6. The pay range and variable structure

Covered in full above. One addition worth making here: the presence of a band at all tells you which jurisdiction the role really sits in, which occasionally contradicts a remote-friendly advert that turns out to be anchored to one city for legal reasons.

7. Location, remote policy and sponsorship

Where a company is willing to employ people is a slower and more honest signal than where it says it operates. A first role in a new country, particularly a commercial one, is a market entry with a legal entity behind it. Willingness to sponsor immigration says something about how badly a skill is needed. And an office address in an advert is stronger evidence than an office on a contact page, because somebody has to actually turn up to it.

8. Success measures and first-quarter language

Adverts increasingly state the outcome directly: pipeline in a named segment, retention in a named region, activation rate, time to value, latency. That sentence is a competitor naming the number their leadership is currently unhappy with, which is about as close to a stated priority as an outsider gets. It is also the field that changes most between two versions of the same role, and a change there is a change of strategy.

9. The described hiring process

Number of stages, who sits on the panel, whether there is a take-home exercise, how long it takes. This reveals how the function is organised, since the panel names the roles that exist around it. It also tells you how fast they can actually add people: a seven-stage process for a mid-level role means their hiring velocity is far below what their number of open adverts implies.

10. Benefits, perks and compliance statements

The bottom of an advert is boilerplate to a candidate and structured data to you. Employing entities and their countries appear here. So do the security clearances, background-check regimes and certification requirements that identify which kind of buyer the company is serving, since those obligations are imposed by customers rather than chosen. A role requiring a specific clearance tells you which contracts they are chasing.

11. The posting metadata

The date it opened, the requisition identifier, how many openings one advert covers and which hiring system serves it. The requisition identifier is the useful one and almost nobody looks: it lets you tell a genuinely new role from a reposted one, which is the single most common way hiring counts get inflated. One advert covering several openings is the second most common.

• Their own careers page is the canonical list, and it is free. It normally renders directly from the hiring system, so it is complete in a way an external board never is. Bookmark the address the apply button reveals, because that address is stable across website redesigns.
• Job sites carry whichever roles were paid for. Syndicating an advert to each board is a separate cost, so a list built from one board is biased toward the roles a company is struggling to fill. Useful as an alert, never as an inventory.
• Historical job data is sold, and it is expensive. Several providers keep dated series of adverts by company, which is genuinely the cleanest way to see hiring over years. Before buying one, check what the free archive of a careers page gives you, since for two or three named competitors it is often enough.
• Regional and specialist boards carry what the large ones miss. Country-specific boards, professional community boards and industry associations frequently list roles that never reach a global job site, and those are exactly the roles that mark a market entry.
• Adverts vanish the moment a role closes. There is no notification and no history on the careers page itself. If an advert matters, copy the text into your own notes on the day you read it rather than planning to return to it.

Recruitment advertising is published to reach the largest possible audience, so reading it is the use its author intended and needs no defence. Everything difficult about this source sits on the other side of the advert, where real people are doing their jobs and where a competitive researcher can do genuine harm without breaking any obvious rule.

• Never apply for a role you do not want. An interview obtained under a false premise wastes a recruiter’s and a hiring manager’s time, is deception aimed at named individuals, and produces almost nothing the advert did not already tell you. There is no version of this that survives being described out loud.
• Do not pose as a candidate to question a recruiter. The same rule applies to the softer version, where somebody makes an enquiry about a role in order to ask what the team is working on. Anybody at a competitor you approach is entitled to know your name and your employer before they answer anything, and to refuse once they do.
• Treat named individuals as personal data. Hiring managers and recruiters are named in adverts and on the systems behind them. Keeping professional details for a legitimate business purpose is ordinary; building a file on named people, or approaching them under a pretext, moves into privacy law and away from anything defensible.
• Keep competitive research separate from recruitment. Hiring a competitor’s employee is a normal commercial act. Hiring one in order to obtain their former employer’s confidential information is trade secret misappropriation, and the two get conflated the moment the same document contains both the hiring analysis and a list of people to approach. Keep them apart.
• Quote the advert, and date what you quote. An advert is copyrighted text like anything else, so take short extracts with attribution rather than reproducing it. The bigger risk is currency: an advert from last year describes a plan that may have been abandoned, and presenting it as current misdescribes a competitor to your own market.

• Whether anybody was hired. An advert coming down means the role was filled, cancelled, paused or simply expired, and those four look identical. Proxy: new joiners appearing publicly in that function, and the same role reappearing three months later, which usually means the first attempt failed.
• How many people they have. Adverts measure intent, not headcount, and the relationship between the two is broken by attrition. Proxy: filed accounts, which disclose employee numbers in several jurisdictions, and disclosed figures in their own recruiting materials.
• What the role was actually created for. Adverts describe a job, and the reason behind it, whether a reorganisation, a lost customer or a departure, is never in the text. Proxy: what happened to the previous holder of the seat, and whether other roles in the same team changed at the same time.
• Anything about roles never advertised. Senior hires, confidential replacements and anything filled through a search firm frequently never appear in public at all. Proxy: appointment announcements, and registry filings where directors and officers must be recorded.
• The timing of anything. An advert tells you a decision has been taken and never when the result arrives. Proxy: documentation and changelog changes, which move much closer to a release than hiring does.

Monthly, open the hiring system for each competitor and record four fields per role: title, location, date opened and requisition identifier. That takes minutes and it is the part that cannot be recovered later, because adverts leave no history when they close. Quarterly, do the reading: extract the named tools, compare the boilerplate against the saved version, note any band that moved and any reporting line that changed.

Reopen early on three triggers, each of which is normally followed by a hiring wave inside a quarter: a funding round, an announced market entry, and a senior appointment. Keep the output in the same place as the rest of the competitor picture rather than in its own document, since hiring is only interesting next to everything else. A competitor tracking spreadsheet with a dated row per pass is enough, and the discipline that matters is recording the date, not the format.

This source has a deletion problem rather than a staleness problem, which makes it different from most of the sources in this cluster. An advert stands for a matter of weeks and is then taken down without trace, and nothing marks the removal. So the comparison that makes the whole method valuable, this quarter’s adverts against last quarter’s, is only possible if somebody happened to be looking last quarter. Miss two passes and you have not fallen behind, you have lost the data permanently, and no amount of catching up afterwards recovers a role that opened and closed in between.

Checking several competitors’ hiring systems every week to catch adverts before they disappear is exactly the sort of standing obligation that competitive intelligence software exists to absorb. Flares keeps a dated record of what rivals publish about their own plans, so a role that was open for three weeks in February is still there when the pattern only becomes obvious in June. What stays with a person is the reading this page is mostly about. Telling apart three adverts that are a fresh bet, three that replace people who left, and three that are a recruiter clearing a backlog takes somebody who already knows the market.