We measured which companies actually give off buying signals. Under 50 employees, it's mostly silence
Building a signal monitoring product forces you to confront an uncomfortable question. Do small companies emit enough public signals to be worth watching at all?
We ran the measurement on our own production data in August. Companies under 50 people were silent about 96 percent of the time over a 90 day window. Then we probed the silent cohort externally, checking careers pages directly, and found the silence was mostly real, not a gap in our detection. Small companies hire through their network and skip public postings.
So the honest answer shaped the product and the content. Hiring signals work best from roughly 50 employees up. Below that, a posting that does appear is rare and therefore strong.
The flip side is that when companies do post, the posting is remarkably honest. It names the tools they've committed to, the team that's growing, and the problem in their own words. There's a Management Science study showing posting changes predict future revenue growth, which was fun to find because it matches what we see daily.
Full breakdown of how to read postings here https://leadalise.com/blog/hiring-signals-job-postings
Curious how others handle this. If you sell to small companies, what do you actually watch, given that public signals mostly aren't there?
The interesting part for me is that you didn't treat “no public signal” as “no activity” — you actually checked the silent cohort externally.
It makes me wonder if the signal model should distinguish between absence of evidence and evidence of absence.
For smaller companies, public hiring may simply be a poor observable signal rather than a reliable negative signal. So instead of lowering their priority entirely, the system could potentially treat a rare positive signal as high-confidence while keeping prolonged silence as “unknown” rather than “not buying.”
I'd be curious whether your data shows a similar pattern with other public signals beyond hiring.
The 96% silence finding is more interesting than the obvious “signals are better at 50+ employees” conclusion. It suggests the absence of a signal may itself be meaningful, rather than simply a weakness in the dataset.
The 96% silence finding matches what I've seen selling to small teams — the signal isn't in postings, it's in behavior. Small companies move fast and publicly skip the paperwork: a team member's LinkedIn updates, new job titles appearing, tools they start mentioning in conversations, even reply times dropping. Postings are a trailing indicator; the network is the leading one. And you're right that a rare posting is worth more — when a small company goes to the trouble of writing one, it usually means real growth, not a compliance checklist. The uncomfortable trade-off is that watching behavior at scale is manual and noisy, which is exactly why most signal tools avoid it.