Definitions for the categories behind hiring-demand data — req-level buying signals, hiring-intent data, ground-truth reqs and competitive hiring intelligence.
Plain-English definitions for the categories behind SignalsAPI's hiring-demand data. Start with the req-level buying signal — every other term is a way of working with it at scale.
A req-level buying signal is a single 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 post. Where a headcount chart says a company grew last quarter, competitive hiring intelligence says which functions it has been investing in, role by role, as the reqs are published.
Read the full definition →An open req is a job requisition a company is actively recruiting for — published, unfilled, and not yet withdrawn. It is the unit every other hiring signal is derived from: one company, one role, one location, one date.
Read the full definition →An is-hiring signal is the company-level fact underneath a set of reqs: this employer posted at least one role inside the window being read. 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 →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 →