How to Track Hiring Signals (With a People Data API)

You track hiring signals with LeadOcean by watching the people, not the postings. We hold no job postings and no live feed. We hold people, their start dates and company headcount, refreshed monthly.

That makes three signals reliable: recruiter teams at a target account, recent hires in the function you sell to, and headcount that moves between snapshots. If you need posting-level alerts the day a role opens, use a job-board feed alongside this. Crustdata covers that side in its hiring signals guide (checked September 2026).

TL;DR

• It takes about 20 minutes to size an account list, pull recent hires and set up a headcount snapshot.
• The walkthrough spends about 30 records: 25 from one search page and a few from enrichment. Counts are free.
• Treat the output as a monthly signal. The dataset refreshes monthly, so "real time" here means your own polling, not our data changing by the minute.

Prerequisites

• A LeadOcean API key from app.leadocean.io. The free plan has 1,000 records, one-off, and no card.
• The key in your shell as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY.
• curl and jq.
• A watchlist of company domains. The examples use acme.com.

export LEADOCEAN_API_KEY="paste-your-key-here"

Step 1: Size the accounts that fit your ICP

Count companies before you watch any. GET /v1/companies/count is free and takes the company search filters.

curl -s -G https://api.leadocean.io/v1/companies/count \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "industry=Computer Software" \
  --data-urlencode "employeeRange=51-200" \
  --data-urlencode "hqCountry=US" | jq '{total: .data.total, exact: .data.totalIsExact}'

Pick the band where a few hires change the buying picture. Between 51 and 200 staff, one new VP of Sales is a real event. At 10,001 or more it is noise.

Step 2: Find companies building a recruiting team

A company with several recruiters is hiring at volume. Count people with a recruiting title in HR, free, with count=true and limit=1 as query parameters.

curl -s -G https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "title=Talent Acquisition,Recruiter" \
  --data-urlencode "jobFunction=Human Resources" \
  --data-urlencode "domain=acme.com" \
  --data-urlencode "count=true" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=1" | jq '.meta | {total, distinctCompanies}'

Run it per domain on your watchlist, or drop domain and use an industry and size filter to see the whole segment. Title values are keywords, so read a sample before you trust a number.

Step 3: Pull recent hires at one account

New leaders in your buyer's function are the strongest people-level signal. Search by domain and function, then sort by start date on your side. The search row carries the current role and its start date.

curl -s https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "domain": ["acme.com"],
    "jobFunction": ["Sales & Business Development"],
    "jobLevel": ["VP", "Director", "Manager"],
    "limit": 25
  }' | jq '[.data[] | {
      person_id: .meta.source_ids.person_id,
      name: .profile_data.profile_full_name,
      role: .contact_data.contact_current_experiences[0]
    }]
    | map(select(.role.start_date != null))
    | sort_by(.role.start_date) | reverse | .[0:5]'

This costs 25 records for the page. The API reference describes the start date in prose without fixing its key name or format, so print one row first and adjust start_date in the filter to match. Rows with no start date are dropped.

Step 4: Check whether a hire is new to the company

A recent start date can be a promotion inside the company. Enrich the person and read the career history to tell a new employer from a new title. Enrich takes one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id.

curl -s https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"person_id": "PERSON_ID_FROM_STEP_3"}' \
  | jq '.data.resume_data.experiences[] | {job_title, company_name, start_date, end_date}'

Print one response first and adjust the keys if they differ: the reference lists title, company name and start and end dates for each past role. If the previous role is at a different company, it is an external hire. Past employers carry no company_id yet, so match them by name. An enrichment that finds nobody is a 404 and costs nothing.

Step 5: Snapshot headcount and diff it

Headcount change is the closest thing to a velocity signal we offer. Enrich each watchlist domain once a month, store the figure, and compare.

for d in acme.com example.com; do
  curl -s https://api.leadocean.io/v1/companies/enrich \
    -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{\"domain\": \"$d\"}" \
  | jq -c --arg d "$d" '{domain: $d, date: (now|strftime("%Y-%m-%d")), employees: .data.company_data.company_employees.number_of_employees}'
done >> headcount.jsonl

Each company is 1 record per snapshot. Run it from cron after the monthly refresh, since a daily run only reads the same figure. A rise of 10 percent in a month on a 100-person company is worth a task. That threshold is a rule of thumb, not a LeadOcean figure.

What you get

Steps 1 and 2 are free. We ran them on 2026-10-21 with leadocean_count_companies and leadocean_count_leads.

The second number is small on purpose. Few small companies employ a dedicated recruiter, so a recruiter at one of them is already a strong flag. Keyword title matching means you should read a sample.

A person from Step 3 comes back in the shape below. This is the response shape from the API reference, with placeholder values. The start_date key is illustrative.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "profile_data": { "profile_full_name": "Jane Doe" },
      "contact_data": {
        "contact_current_experiences": [
          { "job_title": "VP of Sales", "company_name": "Acme", "company_domain": "acme.com", "start_date": "2026-09-01" }
        ]
      },
      "meta": { "source_ids": { "person_id": "1234567890" } }
    }
  ],
  "meta": { "count": 1 }
}

Troubleshooting

FAQ