Hiring Function Watch: New Roles and Founding Signals

Spot a newly observed marketing, IT, finance or other hiring function on the boards you follow. Each signal includes a role URL, the comparison with your saved observations and a suggested starting point for outreach.

A new posting does not prove a first-ever hire or an absent team. An established company can reopen hiring in a function after months with no adverts. This Actor reports what your watch has observed; you check the role and the company before contacting them.

Run with no sources to see four fictional sample rows with no Actor event charge. Watching 100 companies with readable postings costs $2.00 in Actor events per run.

How a watch becomes useful

The first run records a baseline. Later runs using the same watchKey compare new postings with the functions already observed. Explicit first or founding words can produce a separate title-based signal, including on the first run. Head of by itself does not qualify.

Actual demo output

These are fictional examples from the bundled demo, checked on 8 September 2026. They illustrate all four statuses; no live company was researched.

Employer	Status	What the row establishes
Demo Fintech Ltd, marketing	NEW_CATEGORY	Marketing absent from the stored observations, one posting now
Demo Robotics GmbH, IT	FOUNDING_TITLE	The role title contains explicit first-hire wording
Demo Logistics BV, sales	BASELINE	Two postings recorded without an earlier comparison
Demo Fintech Ltd, engineering leadership	RECURRING	The function was already on file

The new marketing row suggests checking the role before offering help with the surrounding work. It makes no claim about the team already employed.

What it does

You give it public job boards or career page URLs. Seven board systems are read directly:

• Greenhouse
• Lever
• Ashby
• Personio
• Workable
• SmartRecruiters
• Recruitee

It reads every open posting and sorts each one into a function from its title, with the department as a fallback. The functions it knows:

• marketing
• sales
• customer success and support
• people and HR
• finance
• IT and internal ops
• security
• data and analytics
• design
• product management
• legal and compliance
• operations
• engineering leadership

Anything that matches no rule is other and is never reported. A Senior Software Engineer is not a signal.

Then it compares what it found with the snapshot it saved last time you ran with the same watch key, and writes one row per employer and function with a status:

NEW_CATEGORY is a function newly observed in this watch. The employer was in the last snapshot, had no prior observation of this function on file, and has one now.

FOUNDING_TITLE fires when the only posting in a function carries a title containing "first" or "founding". It is inferred from the words in the title rather than from history, and the row says so, which is why it can fire on a first run.

BASELINE is every function present on the first run against a new watch key. There is nothing to compare against yet, so nothing is claimed.

RECURRING is a function the employer already had on file.

Every row carries a sample title with its URL and the number of postings open in that function now. It also says when the function was first seen on file. Underneath sit one sentence of reason with the numbers in it and one pitch angle written from the row alone. The pitch angle for a first marketing hire reads: Acme is hiring its first marketing role, so until that person starts there is no marketing function in-house yet.

How to run it

Put one board per line as ats:identifier, or one career page URL per line. Pick a watch key and keep using it for the same list. Run it, then sort the Overview table on the status column.

{
  "atsBoards": "greenhouse:getyourguide\nlever:qonto\nrecruitee:channable\nworkable:skroutz",
  "watchedRoles": ["marketing", "sales", "it_ops", "security", "finance"],
  "watchKey": "eu-scaleups",
  "maxPostingsPerSource": 100
}

If another Actor already scraped the postings, paste them into the postings field as a JSON array of records with employer and title (plus url, department, location and date_posted when you have them) and nothing is fetched.

Leave every source empty and you get four demo rows, one per status, built by the same code that scores real ones. Nothing is charged and nothing leaves the container.

What comes back

The dataset holds one row per employer and function. The NEW_CATEGORY and FOUNDING_TITLE rows come first. I also write an OUTPUT record with the count per status, every signal row named with its pitch angle, any source that failed and why, and one plain line you can post into a channel.

The snapshot lives in a named key-value store on your account, first-hire- followed by your watch key, so a scheduled run and an agent calling the MCP tool see the same history.

What it costs

You are charged once per employer that produced at least one posting, whatever the number of postings or functions. Boards and career pages cost nothing beyond the per-employer event.

Honest limits

• The first run only records a baseline. The signal arrives on the second run and after, when a function shows up that was not there before. Run it on a schedule.
• "First hire" is inferred from what the board shows. A company that already has a marketing team and posts one more marketer after months of no marketing postings will look like a new function to me, because I only know what I have seen. The row says when the function was first seen on file, so you can judge.
• Classification follows a fixed rule table on the title and department. It covers the common titles and it will misfile the odd creative one. Open the sample URL before you write.
• Teamtailor boards are not supported, because their jobs API needs a key issued per company. Give me the career page URL instead.

Use it from an AI agent

Agents can run this Actor through MCP as well as through the console, and I built it that way on purpose. The server sits at https://fractionalhqforyou--first-time-hire-signals.apify.actor/mcp and offers one tool, find_first_time_hires, which scans the same job boards and returns the companies it found. The per-event price is identical either way. Where a raw endpoint is not an option, use apify/actors-mcp-server with fractionalhqforyou/first-time-hire-signals named as the Actor.

Related Actors I publish

When a first hire shows up you still need to know who the company is and how to approach them, and these Actors help with that.

• UK Companies House Enrichment: adds the filing record behind a UK company name so you know who you are dealing with.
• EU Pay Transparency Job Ad Auditor: checks job ads for the pay information the EU directive now expects.

Built and maintained by Jessy Mariau. For a bug, open this Actor's Issues tab with the run ID and expected result. Remove keys and private data before sharing an input.

Signal wording update, 8 September 2026

Status names and field names are unchanged. Suggested pitches now describe newly observed postings and make no claim about the size of a team. FOUNDING_TITLE requires explicit first or founding wording; Head of alone no longer triggers it. Historical snapshots remain compatible.