Ever wondered which company was hiring AI engineers six months ago? Or which startups ramped up recruiting during a specific funding round? Whether you're an investor, recruiter, or market researcher, tracking down old job postings can unlock strategic insights into hiring trends, business growth, and expansion plans.
The catch? Most job boards don't make it easy to access expired listings.
In this step-by-step guide, you'll learn how to find old job postings using reliable tools and methods. No guesswork, scraping, or detours required. I'll also show you how to turn archived listings into actionable insights for talent intelligence, investment due diligence, and competitive research.
Get jobs data at scale
Set up a meeting with our team, and get access to fresh jobs data.
Why look for old jobs?
Old job listings offer a window into a company’s past priorities, product focus, and growth strategies. By reviewing expired postings, you can:
- Track hiring trends to identify when and where companies scaled operations.
- Reveal expansion plans through roles in new markets or verticals.
- Evaluate leadership moves by analyzing former C-suite or VP-level openings.
- Validate investment signals by correlating past hiring activity with funding rounds.
- Benchmark competitors by comparing past role requirements, skills, and team structure.
If you're in HR tech, investment, or market intelligence, archived job postings are often more revealing than current ones, as they show where a company was heading, not just where it is now.
How to find old job postings?
Finding expired job ads doesn’t have to involve guesswork or resource-heavy scraping.
Here’s a reliable way to access historical job postings, especially if you need scalable, structured, and compliant data.
Use historical job posting datasets
Coresignal offers both continuously updated and historical job posting datasets collected from leading public sources. You have two options depending on your use case:
- Base Jobs API – Search by company, keyword, location, or time period. Ideal for on-demand insights or product integration.
- Base Jobs dataset – Get bulk access to structured, enriched, and deduplicated job records. Perfect for training models, building HR tools, or conducting investment research.
Both methods provide access to years of current and historical job data, helping you uncover trends across months or even years.
Our Base Jobs Data includes:
- Job titles, descriptions, salary, and other relevant data
- Industry, seniority, and employment type
- Company information and locations
- Posting and expiration dates
By accessing job data with time stamps, you can recreate a company’s hiring history or track industry-level talent demand.
Combine job data with company or employee data
Want to go further? Match historical job listings with firmographic data (like headcount or funding rounds) and employee profiles to validate patterns.
Here, you can leverage our Multi-source Company API, which helps identify companies that have initiated a hiring spree after a key event, such as a pre-seed investment.
To explore changes in job posting counts, register for a free account on our self-service platform, navigate to Company APIs, and enter your prompt.
Historical job postings data use cases
Old job listings do more than tell you what roles a company used to hire for. They reveal patterns, priorities, and signals you won’t find in press releases or organizational charts. Here’s how different teams use historical job data to drive smarter decisions:
1. VC and PE firms: Validate signals before investing
- Identify headcount spikes or team expansions following funding rounds
- Track hiring for strategic roles like VPs, engineering leads, or GTM teams
- Benchmark portfolio companies against hiring trends in competing firms
Example: A Series A startup hiring a dozen engineers in under two months might be gearing up for a major product release or a pivot.
2. HR tech: Improve sourcing and workforce analytics
- Train models on historical job data to predict future hiring needs
- Map skill evolution to help employers upskill or reskill teams
- Optimize job matching algorithms based on past success patterns
Example: You can analyze how “data science” roles evolved from requiring R to demanding Python experience.
3. Sales and marketing intelligence: Identify buying intent
- Use past hiring for sales, marketing, or operations roles as a proxy for scaling
- Spot companies building new functions (e.g., “RevOps,” “DevSecOps”)
- Trigger outbound campaigns when teams grow in target markets
Example: A sudden uptick in demand generation may signal upcoming tool purchases or CRM transitions.
4. Labor market research: Benchmark industries or regions
- Analyze long-term demand for specific skills across verticals
- Track where companies expand (or contract) hiring by geography
- Evaluate employer demand vs. workforce supply at scale
Example: Compare how remote-first hiring for product roles grew in fintech vs. edtech from 2020 to 2024.
Find old jobs and turn them into insights
Expired job postings offer insights into company strategy, momentum, and market direction. Whether you're an investor validating growth, a recruiter tracking hiring shifts, or a product leader building intelligence tools, old job listings offer valuable, structured data points.
With Coresignal’s historical job posting datasets, you gain more than access but also context. And in a fast-moving, skills-driven economy, context gives you a competitive edge.
Get jobs data at scale
Set up a meeting with our team, and get access to fresh jobs data.
