DEV Community: Firsthand Data

Job alerts from your dream companies, straight from their career pages (no code)

Firsthand Data — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 07:40:09 +0000

Half of the 2,878 tech company job boards we track posted no new job in the week to October 21. The other half posted 6,510.

That's the case for job alerts built on companies, not on keywords. Pick 20 companies you'd love to work for and expect about 40 new jobs a week across all roles. If you're an engineer, about 11 of them are yours: two a working day, few enough to read over morning coffee. The hard part is getting them on the day they're posted without opening 20 career pages every morning.

Here's how to set that up, with numbers from our daily runs on those 2,878 career pages.

TL;DR

Watch 20 to 30 companies, not 5: in a typical week half of them post nothing.
Any job link tells you which hiring system a company uses: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby or SmartRecruiters.
"New" means "first seen by you", not "published this week".
Pick how you'll check: by hand, page-change alerts, your own script or a ready monitor (ours, disclosure below).
Expect most alerts on weekdays: in our data Tuesday had 14 times more new postings than Sunday.

1. Make the list: 20 to 30 companies

In the week to October 21, 51% of the companies in our lists posted nothing new, 32% posted one to three jobs, 12% four to ten, and under 5% more than ten. A typical company had 10 open jobs in total.

So a list of five dream companies will often give you an empty week, while 20 to 30 keep a steady trickle. We drew 20 companies at random from our lists 2,000 times: the middle result was 38 new jobs a week, and half of the draws landed between 26 and 55.

Good places to find names:

products you use every day and would happily work on;
competitors and partners of your current employer, where your experience counts most;
companies that hire remotely, but check where: most remote jobs name a country.

2. Find each company's job board

Most tech companies don't build their own careers backend. The careers page runs on a hiring system (an applicant tracking system, or ATS), and the job links give it away. Open any job on the company's careers page and look at the address:

Address of a job	System	Write down
`boards.greenhouse.io/name` or `job-boards.greenhouse.io/name`	Greenhouse	`greenhouse:name`
`jobs.lever.co/name`	Lever	`lever:name`
`jobs.ashbyhq.com/name`	Ashby	`ashby:name`
`jobs.smartrecruiters.com/name`	SmartRecruiters	`smartrecruiters:name`

If the job opens on the company's own domain, the Apply button usually leads to one of these addresses. Some companies use Workday or other systems: you can still watch them by hand, but the tools below cover these four.

Why go to the company's board at all? It's the complete, current list: every open job with its location, often the pay range, and the real apply link. A job board shows what it picked up, when it picked it up.

3. Decide what "new" means

The published date looks like the answer. It isn't:

Evergreen jobs. Linear's "Senior / Staff Fullstack Engineer" was first published in April 2021 and was still open in October 2026.
Batch days. Speechify published 246 jobs on a single day, a third of everything it had open.
Re-posts. A job taken down and posted again may get a new id and a fresh date.

The rule that works: a job is new when you haven't seen it before. That needs a memory of what you saw yesterday, and that memory is what makes checking by hand so tiring.

4. Pick how you'll check every morning

Way	Cost	Your time	What you get
A bookmarks folder: open all tabs every morning	free	10-20 minutes a day	everything, if you remember what you saw yesterday
Website change alerts	free plans exist	an hour to set up	a ping when the page changes, even when the list is only re-ordered
Your own script on the public job board APIs	free	a weekend, then upkeep	whatever you build; mind the 7 traps in job posting data
A ready monitor	about $2 per 1,000 new jobs	5 minutes	only new and closed jobs, in Slack or email

All four systems publish open jobs through public job board endpoints, so a script is a fine weekend project if you code. If you don't, or you'd rather not maintain one, the last row is what we run.

5. The no-code setup

Disclosure: this is our product. Job Monitor runs on Apify. The free plan needs no credit card, and its $5 of monthly credit covers about 2,500 new jobs.

Add your companies: system:name from step 2, a job board link or just the company website.
Give the watch a name, for example dream-companies, and press Start. The first run returns the jobs of the last 7 days and remembers the older ones for free, so you don't pay for the backlog.
Save it as a task and add a daily schedule in your time zone. New schedules start switched off, so switch it on.
In the task's Integrations tab, send the results to Slack or email.

From then on each morning brings only the jobs that are new since the last run, plus the ones that closed. A day with nothing new costs nothing. On October 21 a new watch on four companies returned the 19 jobs they had posted in the last 7 days; a second run right after it returned 0 and cost nothing.

6. What a morning alert looks like

Each job comes with title, team, location, remote, hybrid or on-site, the pay range as numbers when the company publishes one, the date and the direct link. A real one from October 17:

Tailscale · Program Manager, EPD Operations · Remote (United States) · 114,000-143,000 USD

About half of all postings in our data show pay (51%), and 69% of US ones do. Expect most alerts on weekdays: across all 2,878 boards the week to October 21 had 1,553 new postings on Tuesday and 1,332 on Monday, but 165 on Saturday and 108 on Sunday.

Start small

Make the list tonight, look up the boards tomorrow, and let the new jobs come to you. Hiring Pulse #2, our two-week snapshot of who's hiring, remote share and pay, comes out on November 4.

The data is ours, not AI-generated: our daily runs on the live career pages of 2,878 tech company job boards, October 14-21, 2026. The text was written with the help of AI (Claude).

7 traps in job posting data (we hit all of them counting 61,600 jobs)

Firsthand Data — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:50:07 +0000

On October 21 we counted every open job at 2,871 tech companies, straight from their own career pages on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and SmartRecruiters: Hiring Pulse #1. The counting was fast. Making the numbers mean something was not.

Raw job data looks clean: a title, a location, a date, sometimes a salary. It isn't. Below are the seven traps we hit, each with a real example from our data and what we do about it. If you're building a job board, a hiring-signal feed for sales or a labor-market chart, you'll meet all seven.

1. One job, many rows

Companies post the same role once per city. In our snapshot, 61,600 postings collapsed to 54,226 unique company + title pairs: 12% of all rows were the same role in another location.

Sometimes it's more than a city. Tailscale's "Program Manager, EPD Operations" appeared twice on the same day: Remote (United States) at 114,000-143,000 USD and Remote (Canada) at 152,760-191,620 CAD. Same job, two rows, two currencies.

What to do: decide what you count. For "how many people is this company hiring", count company + title. For "where can I apply", keep the rows.

2. Not every job board is one employer

The second-busiest board in our snapshot, with 228 new postings in a week, belonged to Clera. It lists roles for many different startups, including 18 copies of "Founding Engineer", so it behaves like a recruiter, not like one company growing fast. Translation and AI-training talent pools do the same at scale: hundreds of postings like "Medical Translator - German into Bosnian".

What to do: flag boards whose titles repeat across unrelated teams or look like gig pools, and keep them out of "who is hiring" rankings.

3. Dates don't mean what you think

Batch days. Speechify published 246 roles on a single day (October 20), a third of its 738 open postings. Real growth or old roles re-posted? One snapshot can't tell.
Evergreen postings. Linear's "Senior / Staff Fullstack Engineer" was first published in April 2021 and was still open on October 20, 2026. Some companies keep a role open for years and hire from it again and again.
Weekends. New postings in one week: Saturday 165, Sunday 108, Monday 1,332, Tuesday 1,553. Measure on a Sunday and hiring looks frozen.

What to do: compare snapshots instead of trusting one date, and treat "new" as "first seen by you", not only as the published date.

4. "Remote" comes with fine print

"Remote (United States)" and "Remote (Canada)" are different jobs for a candidate in Berlin. "Remote, Bay Area, CA" means remote, but near San Francisco. Some hiring systems give a remote flag, others only the location text.

What to do: use the remote flag the company sets when there is one, keep the location text next to it and let people filter by both. In our snapshot 43% of postings were remote: 50% in data and AI, 38% in engineering.

5. A salary isn't a number until you parse it

About half of the postings (51%) published a pay range, but where and how varies:

Geography beats remote work. 69% of US postings show pay, Canada 66%, the UK 26%, India 9%. Remote and on-site postings show pay equally often (51% vs 52%).
Fields vs text. Some systems have salary fields; many companies put the range only in the description, in their own format.
Currency and period. USD, CAD, EUR and GBP in one feed; yearly and hourly ranges side by side. In Hiring Pulse #1 we treated only USD ranges of $30,000 or more as yearly, to keep hourly ones out of the medians.
Sales pay. Sales roles often post on-target earnings (base plus commission), which doesn't compare with an engineer's base salary.

What to do: store minimum, maximum, currency and period as separate fields, keep the original text, and never average across currencies or periods.

6. Locations are free text

Real location strings from one company's postings on October 21: "Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Cyprus" and "., Georgia". That's Georgia the country, not the US state, and a naive parser will put those jobs in Atlanta. Others from the same day: "North America", "Remote, USA", "Hybrid (Toronto, Ontario)".

What to do: parse to country and region where you can, keep every location of a multi-location job, and test your parser on the ambiguous names first.

7. Keyword filters match inside words

We group roles by words in the title, and short words bite. "ai" matches "paid", "llm" matches "fulfillment", "ux" matches "Linux", "uk" matches "Ukraine" and "us" matches "Austin". Our first filters did exactly that.

What to do: match whole words, keep a list of short words you never match inside other words, and read 20 random matches by eye before you publish a number.

Build it yourself or use a ready feed?

If you build it yourself, this is the list we ended up with:

four hiring systems, four APIs, four formats to map into one;
polite request rates (one of these APIs allows about 10 requests a second) and each site's rules;
a company list to maintain: companies switch systems, stop hiring or start;
duplicates, recruiter boards, dates, remote flags, salaries and locations from the traps above;
a memory of what you've already seen, so each run gives only the new jobs and tells you which ones closed.

None of it is hard alone. Together it's real work, and the maintenance never ends.

Disclosure: it's our product. If you'd rather get the new jobs from a list of companies every morning than build the pipeline, we run it on Apify and you can try it on the free plan: Job Monitor - New Job Alerts from Career Pages.

Hiring Pulse #2, with what changed in two weeks, comes out on November 4.

Written by an AI assistant (Claude); the data and every example are ours: a snapshot of 61,600 open jobs on October 21, 2026, and the daily runs of our job feeds.

What 61,600 live job posts say about remote work and pay (Hiring Pulse #1)

Firsthand Data — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:20:36 +0000

Most hiring reports come from surveys or from one job board's own listings. We wanted the raw thing: every open job, straight from the companies' own career pages.

So on October 21, 2026 we pulled all open postings from 2,878 tech companies through the public job-board APIs of Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and SmartRecruiters, the same feeds that power the companies' careers pages. No logins, no LinkedIn, no aggregators.

That gave us 61,600 open jobs at 2,871 companies (7 boards had nothing open). This is issue #1 of Hiring Pulse, a snapshot we'll repeat every two weeks, so next time we can show what changed.

TL;DR

43% of open jobs are remote, but it depends on the role: Data & AI 50%, engineering only 38%.
Pay transparency follows geography, not remote work. 69% of US postings show a pay range, 26% in Europe, 9% in India. Remote and on-site jobs show pay equally often.
The typical posted engineering range is $165k-$230k (medians of 7,973 USD ranges).
About 930 new jobs a day: ~1,270 on a weekday, ~140 on a weekend day.
Raw counts lie: one company published 246 roles in a single day, and 12% of all postings are the same role in another city.
1 in 8 engineering postings has AI or ML in the title, and 293 startups are hiring "founding" roles.

The two company lists

1,040 remote-first companies (most of their open roles are remote): 27,424 open jobs, 82% of them remote.
2,344 startups that hire through Ashby: 44,664 open jobs, 29% remote.

506 companies are on both lists; in the totals each company counts once.

1. 43% remote, but not for every role

Data & AI roles are the most remote (50%), followed by customer success (49%), sales (47%) and marketing (46%). Engineering, the job most people picture when they think "remote", sits near the bottom at 38%, next to operations (37%) and recruiting (35%).

The company matters more than the title. At remote-first companies 82% of openings are remote; at Ashby startups only 29%. If you want a remote job, filtering by company type does more work than filtering by role.

Across all postings: 43% remote, 20% hybrid, 25% on-site, and 12% don't say.

2. Who puts the salary in the job post?

Half of all postings (51%) carry a pay range in numbers. Where the job is located decides most of it:

United States 69% and Canada 66%: several US states and Canadian provinces now require a pay range in job ads.
Latin America 27%, United Kingdom 26%, Europe including the UK 26%.
India 9%.

What doesn't matter is remote work: remote postings show pay 51% of the time, on-site 52%, hybrid 50%.

If you hire in Europe, publishing a range already puts you ahead of three out of four postings there.

3. What the posted ranges say

Of the 31,467 postings with pay, 26,932 are in US dollars. For each role we took the yearly USD ranges and the median of their low ends and of their high ends:

Role	Typical range (USD/year)	Ranges
Engineering	$165k-$230k	7,973
Product & design	$170k-$220k	1,369
Data & AI	$150k-$205k	2,384
Marketing	$147k-$194k	1,491
Sales	$140k-$185k	2,935
Recruiting & people	$135k-$180k	628
Operations	$133k-$176k	1,036
Finance	$130k-$170k	513
Customer success	$110k-$145k	638

These are posted ranges at venture-backed and remote-first tech companies, mostly for US roles. They are not a market average, but they are what candidates actually see in the ads.

4. When new jobs appear

6,509 postings were first published in the 7 days before the snapshot, about 930 a day. Day by day:

Day	New postings
Thu, Oct 15	1,154
Fri, Oct 16	1,030
Sat, Oct 17	165
Sun, Oct 18	108
Mon, Oct 19	1,332
Tue, Oct 20	1,553

Weekends are nearly silent; Monday and Tuesday bring the most new roles. If you're job hunting, a check every weekday evening catches nearly everything, and Monday and Tuesday matter most.

5. Who's hiring, and why raw counts lie

The biggest moves this week:

Speechify published 246 roles on a single day (Oct 20), a third of its 738 open postings.
Xplor posted 69 "Account Executive - Direct Sales" roles across the US, 66 of them on Oct 20: one role, many locations, a sales team being built. If you sell to companies, this is the kind of signal worth having in your inbox.
Miratech added 85 roles, most of them senior Java and contact-center engineering.
The biggest open boards: Veeva (933), Speechify (738), Nagarro (691).

Three traps we hit while counting:

The same role in many cities. 61,600 postings, but only 54,226 unique company + title pairs: 12% are the same role posted for another location. If you measure demand, count roles, not rows.
Recruiters and talent pools. The #2 board by new postings this week, Clera (228), lists roles for many different startups, including 18 copies of "Founding Engineer", so it behaves like a recruiter, not a single employer. Translation and AI-training talent pools (hundreds of postings like "Medical Translator - German into Bosnian") inflate counts too.
Batch publishing. A 246-role day can be real growth or old roles re-posted. One snapshot can't tell them apart; two snapshots can, which is why this is a series.

6. AI in the titles, and "founding" roles

4,227 postings (7%) have AI, ML or LLM in the title. Among engineering postings it's 1 in 8 (2,424 of 19,053).
A visible share of "AI jobs" are AI-training and data-annotation gigs rather than AI engineering, so check who the employer is before counting a posting as an AI engineering job.
571 "founding" roles at 293 startups (founding engineer, designer, account executive), not counting the recruiter board above.

How we counted

Snapshot: October 21, 2026, all open postings of 3,384 boards (the two lists), about 3 minutes in total.
Remote: the company marked the posting as remote. Pay shown: the posting has a minimum and/or maximum in numbers.
Pay ranges by role: USD ranges of $30,000 or more (treated as yearly); median of the low ends and median of the high ends.
Roles: keywords in the title (for example, Engineering = engineer, developer, DevOps, SRE). Location: text match on the posting's locations.
New: first published within the 7 days before the snapshot.
Limits: only companies that hire through these four systems (this skews to US and European venture-backed tech), a single snapshot, and roles posted in several cities count several times except in the duplicates note.
No personal data: we keep company, title, location, pay and dates; no names, no contacts.

Want the new jobs from these lists every morning?

We run both company lists as a job monitor on Apify: each run returns only the jobs published since the previous run, with pay as numbers. Disclosure: it's our product, and you can try it on Apify's free plan: Job Monitor - New Job Alerts from Career Pages.

Hiring Pulse #2 comes out on November 4.

Written by an AI assistant (Claude); the data, the counting rules and every number come from our own snapshot of October 21, 2026, described above.