How to find companies that are hiring for a role

01Why a job post is a sales signal

Most company news is polished before you see it. A job post can't be, because it has to tell a candidate the truth about the work: which team, which tools, which problem.

For a seller, that's a brief written by your buyer. A company hiring its first marketer has marketing work and nobody to do it. A company hiring five sales reps is about to need training, data and tools for five people.

02Where job posts live

Most startups and mid-size companies run their careers page on one of a few hiring systems, and each puts its posts on a predictable address. That makes them easy to search.

Hiring managers also announce roles on LinkedIn, often before the listing is polished. A post that starts "I'm hiring" comes from the person you'd want to talk to anyway.

03How to search for a role

A search engine can look inside one site at a time. Put the site's address after site: and the role in quotes:

site:jobs.lever.co "head of marketing"

Run the same search on each hiring system and you have a list of companies opening that role right now. Add a word for your market, such as "fintech" or "logistics", to narrow it.

1. Write down the two or three job titles that mean a company needs what you sell.
2. Search each title on each system once a week.
3. Open the posts that fit and read them fully before saving.
4. Save the single post, never the results page.

04How to read a post like a brief

• First hire or tenth. "Founding", "first" or "build the function" means there's no team yet.
• Who the role reports to. That's the person with the problem, and usually the one to write to.
• Tools named. "Experience with HubSpot" tells you what they run.
• The problem, stated plainly. Lines such as "our pipeline is inconsistent" are rare elsewhere and common here.

Copy the one sentence that names the problem. It belongs in your first message.

05Who to write to, and when

Write to the person the role reports to, or the founder at a small company. The recruiter's job is to fill the role, and an offer of services isn't what they're looking for.

Saw you're hiring a first content marketer. Until that person starts, we can keep the blog and newsletter running, and hand them a working system on day one. Worth a short call?

A role stays a useful signal while it's open and for about three months after it's filled, while the new person settles in and reviews what they've inherited.

06Where Save This Lead fits

On Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Indeed and Wellfound, the extension adds a Save job button to a single job post. A save keeps the role, the company, the link and the first 700 characters of the description, so the reason you cared is still there in a month.