Live demand beats a static list
A target account list tells you who belongs in your market. It does not tell you which of them has a problem this week. A hiring signal does exactly that, and it comes with a date, a job title and usually a location, which is more context than any cold approach starts with.
The failure mode is treating individual job ads as leads. They are not. One advertisement is noise: it might be a backfill, it might be filled tomorrow, it might be an agency posting a fictional role to collect CVs. The signal lives in the aggregate.
What volume tells you
One role is a normal week at that company. Rarely worth a bespoke approach.
Three or more in one discipline means the team is growing or has lost people, and either way the person who owns it has a problem larger than one hire.
A role that has been live for two months means their process is not working. That is the single most useful thing you can know before writing to someone, and it is visible in the posting date.
What you get back
A table grouped by company: how many roles in your discipline, which titles, where, how long each has been live, and which source it came from. For the companies you choose to work, the hiring manager with title and verified work email.
Variations worth knowing
Watch a fixed account list instead of the whole market. If you already have a target list, sweeping only those companies gives you pre-qualified signal with no noise.
Filter on technology. Where the roles you fill are defined by a stack rather than a title, a stack-aware source is sharper than a title search, which is close to meaningless in engineering.
Track disappearances. A role that vanishes has been filled, by someone. Whether that was an agency and which one is worth knowing about your competitors.
Where this goes wrong
Agency postings. In some markets they are the majority of results. They are stripped out, but if a result looks too good, check whether you are looking at a competitor's advert.
Only public postings are visible. Unadvertised roles, internal moves and everything filled through networks are outside this. It is real demand, not total demand.
Ads as leads. Writing to a company about one specific advertisement, in the same week as thirty other agencies who saw the same advertisement, is the least differentiated outreach available. Use the pattern across a company, not the individual ad.