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:namefrom 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).
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