The hiring-signal landscape
Hiring signals reach the market through three very different surfaces — a company's own applicant-tracking system, the job boards that syndicate its postings, and the aggregators that re-list them. Where a signal sits on that path decides how timely, how specific, and how trustworthy it is.
Source signals: the applicant-tracking system
The requisition begins in the employer's own applicant-tracking system or careers site. This is the closest surface to the decision — the role as the company actually defined it, with the least distortion. Signals read here are what this glossary calls ground-truth reqs.
Board signals: syndication
From the source, a req is syndicated to job boards so candidates can find it. A board copy is still recognisably the original posting, but it can carry a re-written title, a board-assigned date, and none of the employer's own structured fields — enough drift that counting board copies over-states and mis-dates demand.
Aggregator signals: re-listing at scale
Aggregators crawl the boards and re-list postings in bulk. By the time a req reaches this layer it may exist as many near-duplicate rows, each with a different provenance and freshness, and the link back to the original employer is often lost. Aggregator rows are abundant and cheap, and they are where naive hiring-demand datasets get their volume — and their duplication and mis-attribution problems.
The point of mapping the landscape is that a hiring signal's value is set by where on this path it is read. A req-level buying signal anchored to ground truth means one company, one need, counted once; the same demand read off the aggregator layer can mean the same company counted a dozen times, dated wrongly, or attributed to a staffing agency instead of the employer.
See the req-level buying signal and the rest of the Reqbeat hiring-signal glossary.