Before you read the Glassdoor reviews. Before you watch the founder's keynote. Before your first conversation with the recruiter.
Read the jobs page.
Not to find a role. To understand what's actually happening at the company.
Most candidates treat the jobs page as a transactional surface: find a role, check the requirements, decide whether to apply. The more useful approach is to treat it as an intelligence document — the most honest, consistently updated, and information-dense thing a company publishes.
Investors pay for data platforms that track hiring signals as a proxy for company health. Sales teams buy tools to monitor competitor job postings as an early warning system for strategic pivots. VC analysts read role titles and team composition changes to understand where a portfolio company is spending a fundraise before the next board deck arrives.
Candidates almost never do this. That's a significant information asymmetry — and one you can close in about twenty minutes before any first-round conversation.
Hiring is a revealed preference. Marketing copy tells you what a company wants you to believe. The jobs page tells you what it actually needs. Every open role represents a budget sign-off, a view about the next twelve months, and a declared gap between where the company is and where it's trying to be.
A company that says it's "doubling down on enterprise" but has no enterprise sales or solutions engineering roles open is showing you the gap between its narrative and its operational priorities. A company that says "we're AI-first" but has only generic software engineering roles is telling you something about the distance between its positioning and its current technical depth.
A company that quietly opens twelve roles in a new function it didn't have six months ago is signalling a strategic shift that hasn't been announced yet.
"Software Engineer" tells you almost nothing. "Software Engineer — AI Inference Infrastructure" tells you the company is at a stage where it needs to optimise how its models run in production. "Software Engineer — Federal" tells you it has made a deliberate decision to pursue government contracts. The specificity of a role title is directly correlated with the company's clarity of direction. Any title that references a market, a customer segment, a technology, or a capability the company hasn't previously emphasised is a potential leading indicator worth noting.
This is the single most informative calculation you can make from public data. A company with 400 employees and 120 open roles is planning approximately 30% headcount growth. That's an aggressive posture.
Rough benchmarks: 5–10% of headcount in open roles suggests measured pace; 10–20% is moderate growth; 20–35%+ is aggressive expansion — the phase where the 50–1,000 employee dynamics apply most strongly. Use LinkedIn employee count to estimate headcount.
A high ratio combined with commercial traction signals (revenue growth, major customer announcements, a recent large funding round) is a strong indicator of genuine growth mode.
Engineering-heavy with light GTM signals a product-focused phase. GTM beginning to match or outpace engineering signals that product has found its market and the growth lever has shifted to distribution — often the phase where commercial roles have outsized career upside. First significant legal or finance hiring usually signals pre-IPO preparation or new market expansion. A sudden cluster of roles in a new geography signals international expansion in progress.
Senior IC or specialist roles open 2–3 months is normal. A VP or Director role open 4+ months means the company is either in active competition for a rare profile, or one or more offers have been extended and rejected. Multiple roles across the same function open simultaneously for 3+ months can signal a compensation issue, a market reputation problem, or an internal hiring hold. Roles that disappear and reopen are common after an offer rejection or when a job description gets revised. Long-sitting senior roles are worth a direct question in the interview — how a company answers tells you something about its self-awareness.
A company claiming to be customer-obsessed with no customer success or support roles open. A company describing itself as data-driven with no data engineering or analytics hiring. A company in a heavily regulated industry with no legal or compliance roles. These gaps between stated identity and actual hiring always warrant understanding — even if there's a legitimate explanation.
Before any first-round conversation:
This takes twenty minutes and gives you better interview questions, more grounded judgment about stage and trajectory, and a clearer read on whether your role is in the part of the business the company is actively betting on.
It also signals to your interviewer a quality of preparation that most candidates don't show up with. That matters more than it might seem.
If the company you're evaluating is on the TalentGiants leaderboard, the jobs page data is already aggregated — current role count, direct link to the careers site, company profile. That saves you the first step.
If it isn't, the same methodology applies. The signals are always in the jobs page. They're just waiting to be read with the right framework.
The goal is to develop the habit of reading hiring data the way a thoughtful analyst would — not as a job-seeker looking for openings, but as someone trying to understand what a company actually is and where it's actually going. That habit, applied consistently, produces significantly better career decisions over time.