Hiring and funding signals: reach the companies that are spending this month

You have a list of 2,000 people who fit. Right title, right company size, right industry. You email all of them and almost nobody answers, and not because the message was bad. Most of them had no reason to change anything this month.

Fit tells you who could buy. It says nothing about who is buying now. The fastest way to find "now" is to look at what a company is already spending money on.

A job posting is a budget you can see

When a 40-person company posts a job for its first Account Executive, a lot is true at once. Someone got approval to spend a salary on sales. There is a deadline, because the seat is empty. And the founder is thinking about pipeline every day until it is filled.

If you sell anything that helps a company sell, that founder is the warmest cold email you will send this week. The same logic works for any product: hiring a Head of Data means data tooling is on the table, hiring a security engineer means compliance is.

Funding is the other visible budget. A company backed by Y Combinator or Andreessen Horowitz has money to spend and investors pushing it to grow.

What PumpGTM does with them

PumpGTM treats a signal as a filter on the company, then finds the right people there. You name the people you want (founders, heads of marketing) and the signal you want their company to have:

1. Company is hiring for a role you name, with a job posted in the last 7 to 90 days.
2. Backed by an investor or accelerator you name.

It reads recent job postings, keeps the companies with a matching opening, and only returns people who work at those companies. Each company keeps the job title, link and date that put it there, so your message can mention the actual role. The setup for both signals, including the MCP fields, is in the signals docs.

What the job data actually looks like

We run this on ourselves. PumpGTM's own outbound goes to founders and sales leaders at US companies hiring for sales and marketing roles. Here is what one month of US job postings looked like when we measured it in September 2026:

Role in the posting	US postings, last 30 days
Account Executive	6,390
Sales Manager	5,072
Marketing Manager	2,694
Sales Development Representative	928
Business Development Representative	868
Head of Marketing	97
Head of Growth	56

Our first campaign targeted companies hiring a Head of Growth or Head of Marketing, because those felt like the perfect trigger. It starved. There were about 150 of those postings in a whole month, across every company size in the country. The companies we wanted were posting the unglamorous roles: AEs, SDRs, marketing managers. Once we led with those, the Play had thousands of companies to draw from.

The lesson: pick the role a company posts when it has your problem, not the role that sounds most senior.

"We're hiring" posts are great, and rare

The other way to spot hiring is a LinkedIn post where someone says "I'm hiring an SDR, DM me." It is a stronger signal, because the author owns the role. We tested it. A strict search for US people posting that they were hiring for growth, marketing or GTM roles found 87 posts in 30 days, and when we checked the first 40 by hand, 13 were real hiring managers at companies under 500 people.

Thirteen is a lovely list, and it is not a campaign. Job postings give you thousands of companies a month. So we use postings for volume and keep posts for the handful of people worth a handwritten note.

Three mistakes to skip

Mixing up the company's opening with the person's title. The role you are hiring for is the company's, not the person's. If you put "SDR" in the title field, you find SDRs. Put "Founder, CEO" in the people field and "Sales Development Representative" in the hiring field.

Writing roles nobody uses. A posting counts when every word of your role phrase is in the job title. "Head of Demand Gen" misses "Director, Demand Generation." Write the two or three ways companies actually title the job.

Pretending the signal says more than it does. A job posting proves the company is hiring. It does not prove the founder read your email category and wants a demo. Mention the role plainly ("saw you're hiring your first AE") and ask one small question. Do not write as if you know their plans.

Where funding fits today

The funding signal in PumpGTM answers "who backs this company", not "who raised last month". You can target founders at YC companies or at companies backed by any named investor. You cannot yet filter by round size or by how recently they raised, and we would rather say so than let you find out.

In practice the two signals are strongest together. "Founders at YC companies under 50 people, hiring their first Account Executive in the last 14 days" is one Play, and it is about as close to a list of people with money, a deadline and your problem as outbound gets.

Try it

In PumpGTM, open Plays, choose New Play, then Companies hiring. Change the roles to the ones a company posts when it needs you, run it, and read the list before anything is sent. If you work from Claude or ChatGPT, the reach companies hiring prompt does the same thing over MCP.