Built Straight from the Source
When it comes to job posting data, not all datasets are created equal. Many rely on job boards, aggregators, or third-party feeds for sourcing their data. Anyone who has worked with these types of sources understands the pain points: stale listings, evergreen posts, incomplete coverage, and limited visibility into true hiring activity.
That’s why, when we set out to build our own
Job Posting Dataset, we chose a different approach:
sourcing postings directly from company career pages.Why? Because a company’s own career page is the single best indicator of hiring intent. It’s where new roles appear first and where they disappear once they’re filled. By going straight to the source, we can offer the freshest and most accurate view of the labor market.
We source job data directly from company career pages, because we believe it's the single best source of hiring intent.
How We Source Job Data
So what does “sourcing directly from career pages” really mean?
When a company is hiring, one of the first public places they post is their own website (as opposed to third-party job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed which are often updated after-the-fact). Therefore, we focus our sourcing efforts on a company’s website.
Here’s what happens behind the scenes:
- Daily crawls: We scan company career pages every day, capturing both newly posted and recently closed roles
- Timestamp tracking: We log the exact day a role was published, updated, or taken down. This is often a critical set of information for use cases that depend on precise hiring signals.
- Direct linking: We link every job post we source back to the exact company and job post we observed. This means that every active job in our dataset links back to a real posting on the company’s site and is an exact representation of the information it contains.
- Historical Tracking: Once we’ve seen a role, it stays in our dataset (even after it's taken down) as a timestamped snapshot of the role. Our history begins in October 2024 and is growing every day.
In other words, we don’t just grab jobs once and call it a day. We actively track each role across its lifecycle and deliver a standardized dataset built for accuracy and scale.
We track every job opening across its lifecycle with daily crawls, timestamped updates, direct links to postings, and historical snapshots.
Why This Is Hard (and Worth It)
Of course, sourcing this way isn’t simple. Every company’s career page looks different, has its own quirks, and comes with its own technical challenges. Building this dataset at scale has required:
- Developing thousands of dedicated custom crawlers
- Converting messy, unstructured listings into structured, usable, and consistent data
- Running daily quality checks to catch anomalies
- Maintaining the infrastructure to do all of this, every single day
It took nearly a year of engineering, iteration, and customer feedback to bring our first production dataset to life. But the effort was worth it, because it means we can deliver something more reliable and impactful than the existing alternatives on the market.
Building a dataset straight from career pages takes custom crawlers, dedicated infrastructure, and a lot of trial-and-error to get right.
Why Going Straight to the Source Matters
So why should you care about our sourcing approach? Here are three big reasons:
1. Accuracy you can trust
Career pages are where companies publish and update their openings first. By avoiding job boards, we eliminate “zombie” posts and duplicates. That means a cleaner, truer picture of actual hiring activity.
2. Broader, More Representative Coverage
Not every company posts to third-party boards, and this is especially true for early-stage startups, niche employers, and those looking to avoid posting fees. By going straight to company career pages, we capture roles that would otherwise be invisible.
3. Real-Time Hiring Signals
Because we crawl daily, you get near real-time visibility into when roles are created or closed. That’s a huge advantage for anyone tracking market dynamics or trying to spot hiring trends as they unfold.
We go straight to company career pages to deliver accuracy you can trust, broader coverage, and near real-time hiring signals.
Conclusion
When companies publish job postings, they’re doing more than just hiring, they’re sending powerful signals about growth, strategy, and demand. But to unlock those signals, the data has to be fresh, accurate, and reliable.
That’s why our sourcing strategy is a big part of what makes our Job Posting Dataset different:
- Fresher data
- Fewer duplicates
- More accurate hiring signals
- Broader coverage across employers of all sizes
Job posting data isn’t easy to get right. But at PDL, we believe ours is Built Different, and we’re excited for you to see the difference.
Our dataset gives you fresher data, fewer duplicates, more accurate hiring signals, and coverage across employers of all sizes.
What's Next
If you’re interested in learning more about our Job Posting Dataset you can:
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