Monitor target companies for new jobs, without watching everything
If you work a named account list, timing matters. This guide gives you a repeatable workflow: find each company’s real job source, define what counts as relevant, track first-seen roles, and use alerts to prioritize outreach.
Step-by-step workflow
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Start with a target-company list you can actually cover
Keep the list small enough to use.
- Tier 1 (high priority): 10–30 companies you want to speak to weekly
- Tier 2 (monitoring): 50–200 companies you want visibility on
Create a simple sheet with:
- Company name
- Website
- Location(s) you cover
- Your angle (what you place)
- Notes on org structure / business unit targets
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Identify the *actual* career-page source for each company
Many companies do not host jobs on their main domain. They use an ATS subdomain or a vendor-hosted board.
For each company, capture:
- Primary careers page URL (the page humans click)
- Jobs listing URL (the page with role cards/results)
- ATS/vendor URL if it redirects (use the final URL)
Tip: don’t stop at the Careers page. Click into a role and check that the listing pattern is consistent enough to monitor.
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Decide what roles matter (and write it like a filter, not a wish)
Write your relevance rules so another person could run them without asking you.
Define:
- Functions: e.g. Sales, Data, Product, Finance
- Seniority bands: e.g. IC / Manager / Director
- Locations / remote rules: country, city, hybrid
- Hard exclusions: internships, internal-only, temporary, volunteer
Then turn that into keyword sets:
- Include keywords (must-have)
- Exclude keywords (deal-breakers)
- Nice-to-have keywords (optional tags)
Keep a keyword dictionary you can reuse across accounts. It makes the filtering more consistent.
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Choose your monitoring method: manual, semi-automatic, or automated
Pick the lightest method that gives you enough speed.
Manual (works for Tier 1, small lists):
- Weekly calendar block to check career pages
- Save key URLs in a bookmark folder
- Copy new roles into a sheet
Semi-automatic (good middle ground):
- Subscribe to email job alerts if the ATS supports it
- Use RSS feeds where available
- Use browser page-change tools for a handful of critical URLs
Automated (best for ongoing coverage):
- Monitor configured career pages and job boards on a schedule
- Extract job listings from those public pages
- Filter to your brief with keyword matching
- Send alerts by email and/or webhook
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Set a review cadence that matches hiring velocity
Daily monitoring only helps if someone reviews it daily.
A practical cadence:
- Daily (10–15 minutes): review new/changed roles across Tier 1 and the hottest Tier 2 accounts
- Weekly (30–60 minutes): review hiring trend direction and repeat signals
- Monthly: remove targets that never move; add new accounts based on wins, losses, and live conversations
The point is not to collect every job. It is to produce a short list of accounts to act on this week.
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Handle duplicates (or you’ll stop trusting the feed)
Duplicates usually come from:
- The same job appearing on multiple pages (company careers + vendor board)
- Reposts with small title changes, such as “Sales Exec” vs “Account Executive”
- Multiple locations for the same role
Your dedupe rules can be simple:
- Treat company + job ID (if available) as the primary key
- Otherwise use company + normalized title + location
- Keep one master record and store variations in notes
If you cannot dedupe cleanly, the workflow turns into triage instead of signal.
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Track “first seen” date (this is what makes outreach timely)
The posting date on a career page is not always reliable. The more useful internal metric is your first-seen timestamp.
In your sheet or system, store:
- First seen (date/time)
- Last seen (date/time)
- Status (new / changed / closed)
- Source URL
This lets you:
- Prioritize brand-new roles
- Spot roles that keep getting reposted
- Avoid chasing roles that are already stale
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Review changes, not just new jobs
Changes often tell you more than the original advert:
- Location switches (office → hybrid / remote)
- Seniority changes (Manager → Director)
- Team scope changes in the description
- New headcount batches across the same department
Build a change-log habit:
- Save the new version
- Note what changed
- Decide whether it gives you a stronger outreach angle
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Turn alerts into a simple outreach priority list
Don’t send your team a dump of roles. Send a ranked list of accounts.
A basic scoring model:
- +3: first-seen today/last 24 hours
- +2: role matches your core niche
- +2: multiple roles in the same function/team
- +1: senior role that implies team build
- −2: role reposted repeatedly (could be hard-to-fill, but may also be saturated)
Output:
- Top 10 accounts to contact
- One reason why (the signal)
- One suggested angle (what you can credibly help with)
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Automated workflow with RecruitmentSignals
If you want this running without daily manual checking, RecruitmentSignals can support account-based monitoring.
A typical setup:
- We configure target sources: the career pages and job boards you care about
- We set keywords: include/exclude terms so only relevant roles alert
- Choose delivery: daily email digest and/or webhooks
- Review results: use shareable dashboards to collaborate internally, or share externally
Notes on coverage and enrichment:
- RecruitmentSignals monitors the public sources, on a schedule.
- Where job pages include named contacts or reporting lines, those names/titles may be extracted. This is opportunistic page extraction, not a people database, and not guaranteed for every role.
Practical templates you can copy
Target list template (minimum viable)
Use one row per company.
- Company
- Tier (1 or 2)
- Careers URL (human page)
- Jobs listing URL (results page)
- Primary locations
- Functions you care about
- Include keywords
- Exclude keywords
- Notes (subsidiary, division, brand, hiring patterns)
Relevance rules
Keep it blunt. This stops your monitoring from drifting.
Include:
- "account executive" OR "sales development" OR "business development"
- "data engineer" OR "analytics engineer"
Exclude:
- "intern" OR "graduate" OR "student"
- "volunteer" OR "unpaid"
Location rules:
- UK only, or Remote (UK)
Dedupe rules (simple and effective)
- If the page has a job ID, use:
company + job_id - If not, use:
company + normalized_title + primary_location
Normalization tips:
- lowercase
- strip seniority prefixes if needed, such as "Senior" or "Lead", only if it helps you dedupe
- collapse whitespace
What to do when the source is messy
Some boards are hard to parse consistently. Endless scroll, heavy scripts, and frequent layout changes can all get in the way.
Options:
- Find a more stable URL. Sometimes there is a basic results endpoint.
- Monitor a smaller set of higher-signal pages, such as only the "Engineering jobs" page.
- Fall back to manual checks for that account until you can replace the source.
The goal is not a perfect map of the market. It is a workflow you will still run in three months.
FAQ
How many target companies should I monitor?
If any part of the process is manual, start with 10–30 Tier 1 companies. Add Tier 2 when you have a reliable alerting method. If you try to track 500 accounts by hand, you’ll miss things or stop checking.
What’s the best signal: new job postings or changes to existing ones?
Both matter, but they do different jobs:
- First-seen new roles help you time outreach.
- Role changes help you tailor the message. Scope expanded, location opened up, seniority shifted.
If you can only pick one, start with first-seen. Add change tracking once the basics are working.
How do I avoid getting flooded by irrelevant roles?
Be strict:
- Use exclude keywords aggressively: intern, graduate, seasonal, volunteer, and similar terms
- Split monitoring by function, such as Sales vs Data, so each feed has a clear brief
- Keep a short list of always-irrelevant terms and reuse it across accounts
If the feed is noisy, people stop trusting it.
How do I handle the same role posted in multiple locations?
Pick a rule and stick to it:
- If you only care about one geography, treat other locations as duplicates.
- If location matters, keep one master record and store locations as a list.
Avoid contacting the same account twice because your tracking system thinks one vacancy is two different jobs.
Do job postings mean the company is using agencies?
No. A job appearing on a career page is evidence that the company is hiring for that role. Use it as a trigger to research the org and decide whether you can add value. It is not proof of agency usage.
Can RecruitmentSignals alert me in real time?
RecruitmentSignals runs scheduled monitoring and sends daily signals when there is something to send, via email and/or webhooks. It is built for consistent coverage of the public sources you configure, not real-time updates.
Can RecruitmentSignals find hiring manager contact details?
Sometimes a job page includes a named contact or reporting line. Where that is publicly present on the page, RecruitmentSignals may extract names/titles. It is opportunistic page extraction, not a people database, and it is not guaranteed for every role.
Related content
Want this running on your target accounts?
RecruitmentSignals monitors the career pages and job boards you configure, extracts listings from public pages, filters them with keyword matching, and sends daily alerts by email and webhook.
If manual checks and duplicate role noise are slowing the team down, we can help you set up a clean target-source list and a brief that stays focused.