Finding Newly Opened Jobs via Greenhouse, Lever & Ashby APIs
How to build a real-time hiring intent tracker using public JSON feeds from Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby without expensive subscription tools.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- New job postings serve as precise buying signals because they operate on strict time windows.
- Major ATS platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby expose public unauthenticated JSON feeds.
- Detecting truly new roles requires maintaining persistent state and comparing historical runs.
- A test across 10 major tech companies pulled 3,664 normalized job postings in about one second.
When a company posts a job, that posting comes with a timestamp, and the timestamp is the interesting part. A new VP of Sales role usually means budget just got approved and a decision-maker seat is about to be filled. A first Data Engineer opening means someone is standing up a data platform right now, while three Account Executive listings in one week indicate a team scaling its go-to-market strategy that quarter.
People call this hiring intent data, and it is one of the most useful buying signals around because of its timing. A role that shows up today opens a window today, whereas six weeks later the tool is often chosen and the problem quietly solved. You do not need an expensive intent-data subscription to spot this information since three of the biggest applicant tracking systems—Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby—serve their customer job boards as public, unauthenticated JSON. If you can make an HTTP request, you can build your own hiring feed.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
A company's careers page usually operates as a front end for a public JSON feed served by the ATS without requiring any keys or OAuth. You only need the company's board slug to query endpoints such as https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/{company}?mode=json or Ashby's board API at https://api.ashbyhq.com/posting-api/job-board/{org}?includeCompensation=true, which can typically be found directly from the company's careers links.
This is where homemade trackers usually break. These APIs provide a current snapshot of open roles, but they lack a reliable posted-at timestamp consistent across all providers. Greenhouse specifically lacks a dependable creation date on its board endpoint, and the updated_at value shifts every time someone edits a description.
"A role that shows up today is a window that's open today. Six weeks later the tool has been picked and the problem is quietly solved."
Dev.to
Consequently, identifying genuinely new postings requires computing the differences independently by storing the previous run and comparing it against the current snapshot. Developers must persist state somewhere durable, key off provider job IDs rather than titles to prevent renamed roles from appearing new, and anticipate cold starts where historical records do not yet exist.
Utilizing public ATS APIs for tracking corporate hiring activity represents a powerful growth hacking and B2B prospecting technique. Because new job openings reflect immediate capital allocation, team expansion, and infrastructure builds, they provide much more accurate signals than quarterly financial reports. However, developers must carefully handle API rate limits, schema normalization across different ATS vendors, and robust state management to prevent false positives caused by lost state data.
Once a clean feed of new roles is established, the applications are extensive, ranging from monitoring target account lists for immediate alerts to ranking openings by seniority or spotting aggressive expansion phases. The author recently executed this approach across ten companies simultaneously—Stripe, OpenAI, GitLab, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, Airbnb, Discord, Ramp, and Notion—successfully pulling 3,664 normalized job postings across all three ATS platforms in about one second.
Source: Dev.to
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