Hiring Signals for US Accounts: A Free Method From India

You sell dev tools, cloud or IT services from India, and your best-fit buyers are US tech companies. Writing the email isn't the hard part. Knowing which company has a reason to buy this month is, and you'd rather not pay for a US intent-data subscription to find out. Hiring signals cover a lot of that ground. As Databar puts it, "Job postings require budget approval, headcount planning, and leadership sign-off". Here's the free version of hiring signals prospecting. You read the company's own job board, score what you find, drop the fake posts, and open with the role fact instead of your product.

lemlist argues that "a company that posts a job is telling you, in public and on the record, where it is about to spend". Its reasoning is that the company "has a gap, it has decided the gap is worth a salary, and it is hiring against it right now". Salesgear says it more briefly: "A role is a budget line with a name on it".

In a dev.to post, Martin Petrov takes the idea from single roles to clusters. "A company that opens 30 new sales roles in a week is about to buy sales tools," he writes, and "a company that adds 60 engineers is about to buy dev tools, cloud and hiring services". That's his opinion, not a measured result. Treat it as a reason to look closer, not as proof that a deal is waiting.

For a seller in India, the useful part is that you don't need a US data vendor to read this signal.

Start from your product, not the job board. Which roles, opened several at once, would mean your product is about to matter? The table is my reasoning about what each pattern usually points to. It isn't measured data.

Author's reasoning, not measured data.

Sell what the pattern implies, not the hiring itself. If you sell dev tools, a company hiring engineers is a dev-tools lead, not a recruiting lead. If you do sell hiring services, the recruitment leads guide is written for you.

If a company's careers page runs on Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, you can read its open roles as JSON in a browser tab. There are three URL patterns.

Greenhouse: https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/{board_token}/jobs. The Greenhouse Job Board docs say "authentication is not required for any GET endpoints". Add ?content=true to get the department and office of each post. Swap /jobs for /departments to get "a list of your organization's departments and jobs".

Lever: https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/{site}?mode=json. The Lever Postings API says "all job postings in the published state are publicly viewable". Each posting has categories for location, team and department.

Ashby: https://api.ashbyhq.com/posting-api/job-board/{JOB_BOARD_NAME}. In the Ashby posting API docs, each job has a department, team and publishedAt, the "ISO DateTime when the job was last published". The docs don't mention auth, but the endpoint returned jobs without a key on 13 Nov 2026.

All three returned data without a key on 13 Nov 2026. Greenhouse, using Airbnb's board, returned HTTP 200 with title, location, first_published, updated_at and a meta.total count. Lever's demo board returned department, team, location and a createdAt timestamp. That field isn't in Lever's docs.

For the board name, open a role on the careers page and check the link. If it points to Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, the name in that link is usually the one you need.

Score each company on three things.

Not every posting is a real hire. FOX 9 reported in January 2025 that a Greenhouse analysis "found that between 18% and 22% of job postings last quarter" were ghost jobs, meaning postings "published online with no intention of actively hiring". ResumeBuilder, which sells resume products, ran a survey of hiring managers in May 2024 that reported "3 in 10 companies currently have active fake listings". Of 1,641 hiring managers surveyed, 649 completed it. The top reasons they gave were "to make it appear the company is open to external talent (67%)" and "to act like the company is growing (66%)".

Filter before you write:

lemlist advises against opening with "I saw you are hiring". Use three parts instead: the specific role fact, what that role usually inherits, and one question.

Here's a made-up example of the shape: "You opened four platform engineering roles in the past fortnight, all in Austin. New platform hires usually inherit whatever CI setup exists today. Is replacing it part of their brief?" Add one line on what you do, then stop.

Selling from India, you don't need to say where you're based in line one. Your location can go in the signature. Once you have a short list, I'd work it with the 20 named accounts loop, using hiring as the one signal per account.

This method is free and needs no tool. If you'd rather not build the account list by hand, Mantis can help there. Our own pages describe it as pulling "the named accounts, the visible signal and a reachable person". For more methods that don't start with a bought database, see how to get leads without buying lists.

I'm Tarun, founder of Mantis. If you want to try it, there are 500 free credits once at signup, no card. Start here.