Hiring Signal Monitor

Find out which companies your competitors are working with - before anyone else does.

Recruitment agencies, consultancies, and B2B sales teams use this Actor to:

• See which companies your competitors are actively working with by analyzing their public job listings
• Catch companies raising funding or expanding before they post their first job

A job board scraper that goes further than raw data - it tells you who your competitors are working with. Two modes: weekly job board intelligence + daily news signals.

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Who is it for

• IT recruitment agencies - identify which companies your competitors are placing candidates at
• B2B SaaS sales teams - find companies that just raised funding or opened new offices
• Management consultancies - track which firms your competitors are engaged with
• Marketing agencies - find brands entering new markets or launching new products
• Staffing firms - monitor hiring signals across a specific geography or sector

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Why it's different: smart job deduplication

Most scraping tools re-process everything every run. This Actor doesn't.

On the first run for each competitor URL, it saves a fingerprint of every job listing. On every subsequent run, it compares the current listings against those fingerprints and only analyzes new jobs - ones that appeared since the last run.

This means:

• A competitor with 200 live jobs costs the same to monitor weekly as one with 20 jobs
• You only get notified about genuinely new client engagements
• Your results feed only contains fresh discoveries - existing jobs are filtered out so you're never re-notified about the same competitor engagement twice

The baseline persists across runs indefinitely and survives between weekly and daily schedules.

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What it does

Competitor job board monitor

Recruitment agencies, consulting firms, and B2B service providers post jobs on behalf of their clients. The descriptions are often copied directly from the client's internal posting - and those sentences are traceable.

The job board scraper crawls competitor career pages, detects new listings since the last run, and uses AI to infer which end client each job was posted for.

Example output (Asia):

Robert Walters Thailand posted a new Senior Java Developer role. Based on the language and tech stack, the end client is likely Accenture Thailand. Confidence: high.

Example output (Europe):

Michael Page Germany posted a new SAP Consultant role. Based on the job description, the end client is likely Deutsche Telekom. Confidence: medium.

Example output (US):

Robert Half posted a new Staff Accountant role. Based on the description language and sector, the end client is likely Deloitte US. Confidence: high.

If a site blocks the initial request, the Actor automatically retries with a residential proxy - no extra config needed.

News signal monitor

Run daily searches across Google News for signals that a company in your target industry is about to hire. Funding announcements, office openings, acquisitions, and expansions all get scored 1–10 by AI. Only articles above your chosen threshold (default: 7) appear in the output.

Example output (Asia):

SCB Tech Group announced a 200-person engineering hub in Bangkok. Score: 9/10 - direct expansion signal for IT hiring.

Example output (Europe):

Zalando announced it is expanding its engineering hub in Berlin with 500 new hires. Score: 9/10 - direct hiring signal for tech recruitment.

Example output (US):

Stripe raised a $600M Series I and announced plans to double its engineering team. Score: 10/10 - confirmed funding and headcount expansion.

Analyze job boards + news signals (default)

Run both workflows in a single Actor run and get a unified dataset.

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Pricing

Pay Per Event - you only pay for what gets processed.

Plan	Job board analyzed	News article scored
Free	$80 / 1,000	$20 / 1,000
Starter	$50 / 1,000	$10 / 1,000
Scale	$40 / 1,000	$8 / 1,000
Business+	$30 / 1,000	$6 / 1,000

Actor start costs $0.05 / 1,000 runs (negligible).

Typical monthly cost (Starter plan):

• 5 competitor job boards monitored weekly: ~$1/month
• 20 news articles scored daily: ~$6/month
• Total: ~$7/month - a fraction of Apollo ($49+/mo) or Sales Navigator ($99+/mo)

The smart deduplication keeps job board monitoring costs flat regardless of how many jobs a site has. You pay to monitor, not to re-analyze jobs you've already seen.

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Setup

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console
2. Set Competitor career page URLs - add the career pages of the companies you want to monitor
3. Set Industry (for example: IT, fintech, healthcare) and Geography - use the full country or region name for best results (for example: Thailand, United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Southeast Asia)
4. Choose Signal categories: funding, expansion, hiring, joint venture, new office
5. Click Start

No API key required. The Actor works immediately.

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Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	both	both (job boards + news), competitor_jobs, or news_signals
competitorUrls	string[]	example pre-filled	Career page URLs to monitor
industry	string	IT	Industry for news searches
geography	string	Thailand	Target geography for news
signalCategories	string[]	all 5	Signal types to track
minSignalScore	integer	7	Minimum score (1–10) for news articles
maxArticlesPerQuery	integer	10	Max articles fetched per search query

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Output schema

Competitor job result — score reflects AI confidence that the job belongs to an end client (9 = high, 6 = medium, 3 = low):

{
  "source": "competitor_jobs",
  "company": "Accenture Thailand",
  "signalType": "client_of_competitor",
  "score": 9,
  "reason": "Job description language and tech stack match Accenture's hiring patterns in Thailand",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.robertwalters.co.th/jobs/senior-java-developer-123",
  "competitorName": "robertwalters.co.th",
  "jobTitle": "Senior Java Developer",
  "dateFound": "2026-05-28",
  "isNew": true
}

News signal result — score is a direct 1–10 hiring signal rating (7+ recommended threshold, 9–10 = confirmed expansion or funding):

{
  "source": "news",
  "company": "SCB Tech Group",
  "signalType": "expansion",
  "score": 9,
  "reason": "Announced 200-person engineering hub in Bangkok - direct hiring signal",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.bangkokpost.com/...",
  "competitorName": null,
  "jobTitle": null,
  "dateFound": "2026-05-28",
  "isNew": true
}

If no new signals are found in a run, a single summary entry is pushed so the dataset is never empty (signalType: "no_new_signals"). If a competitor site fails to load, an error entry is pushed for that URL instead.

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How the baseline works

The first time you run the Actor against a competitor URL, it crawls the page, analyzes all current job listings with AI, and saves a fingerprint of each one. You get an immediate full snapshot of your competitors' current client portfolio.

From the second run onwards, only listings with hashes not seen before get analyzed. The baseline grows over time, so each run only surfaces what's genuinely new since the last one - you're never shown the same intelligence twice.

This is intentional: a competitor posting 200 jobs that haven't changed costs the same as a competitor with 5 jobs. You pay to monitor, not to re-analyze.

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FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. The Actor works out of the box with no configuration.

How often should I run it? Competitor job boards: weekly. News signals: daily. Set up Apify Scheduler on the Actor to automate both.

What happens on the first run for a competitor URL? The Actor analyzes all current job listings and gives you a full snapshot of your competitors' existing client portfolio. From the second run onwards, only new listings are analyzed - so your feed stays fresh without repeats.

What if a competitor site blocks the crawler? The Actor automatically retries with a residential proxy. If the site still fails, the URL appears in the output with signalType: "error" so you know which ones need attention. Residential proxy cost is billed by Apify separately from Actor fees.

Can I use this for industries other than recruitment? Yes. The news signal monitor works for any B2B industry and geography. The competitor job board feature is most useful for service businesses where competitors post client work publicly.