Hiring-signal glossary

Definitions for the categories behind hiring-demand data — req-level buying signals, hiring-intent data, ground-truth reqs, competitive hiring intelligence, and the hiring-demand API.

Plain-English definitions for the categories behind Reqbeat's hiring-demand data. Start with the req-level buying signal — every other term is a way of working with it at scale.

Req-level buying signal

anchor concept

A req-level buying signal is a single open job requisition read as an intent signal: one company, at one moment, committing budget and headcount to a specific role. It is the atomic unit of hiring demand — evidence that a team is being built, a tool is being adopted, or a function is being scaled, before any of that reaches a funding round or a press release.

Read the full definition →

Hiring-intent data is structured information about which companies are hiring, for which roles, where, and when — derived from public job postings rather than surveys or self-reported firmographics. Unlike generic intent data inferred from web behaviour, it is grounded in an action a company actually took: it opened a requisition.

Read the full definition →

Ground-truth reqs are job requisitions read as close to the employer as possible — from a company's own careers site or applicant-tracking system — rather than reconstructed from an aggregator's re-listing. They are the hiring record before relisting, normalisation and duplication blur what was actually opened.

Read the full definition →

Competitive hiring intelligence is the practice of tracking a defined set of companies — competitors, acquirers, portfolio companies, or target accounts — by the roles they are actively hiring for. Where a headcount chart says a company grew last quarter, competitive hiring intelligence says which functions it is investing in right now, role by role.

Read the full definition →

A hiring-demand API is a programmatic interface that returns open requisitions and hiring-signal data as structured records — queryable by company, role, location and recency — so the data flows straight into a CRM, a data warehouse, or an agent, with no manual exports and no spreadsheet in between.

Read the full definition →

A watch fire is one delivered change on a standing hiring search: the moment a company matching your criteria opens, changes or closes a requisition, and that change reaches your endpoint. It is the unit of monitoring — what is charged for is the change delivered, not the search kept open.

Read the full definition →

A hiring-demand MCP server exposes req-level hiring signals as Model Context Protocol tools, so an AI agent can query open requisitions directly — asking who is hiring for a role, in a region, right now — instead of being handed a static export a person had to fetch first.

Read the full definition →

The signals themselves

Open req

An open req is a job requisition a company is actively recruiting for — published, unfilled, and not yet withdrawn. It is the raw observation every other hiring signal is derived from: one company, one role, one location, one date.

Read the full definition →

Is-hiring signal

An is-hiring signal is the company-level fact underneath a set of open reqs: this employer is recruiting right now. It answers a yes/no question about an account rather than describing a single role, which is what makes it the signal that routes an account into a play.

Read the full definition →

Hiring pulse

A hiring pulse is the rate of change in hiring demand rather than its level: how many reqs opened this week against the week before, for a company, a role or a market. Where an is-hiring signal says whether an account is recruiting, the pulse says whether it is accelerating.

Read the full definition →

Go deeper