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Signal key

employee_growth

Category

Growth

Source

Company Professional Network page (employee count field).
A company’s employee count increased by at least one between snapshots.

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When it fires

Trigger condition

employee_count increases by ≥ 1 between two consecutive snapshots.

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Magnitude

Bucketed on the percentage change in employee_count. A single hire at a 10-person company (10%) buckets far higher than one hire at a 5,000-person company. Buckets are assigned from the percentage change between snapshots:

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Why it matters

It’s the most basic growth marker. On its own it’s gentle, but it’s the foundation many composite signals (expansion_signal, headcount_recovery) build on. Sustained employee_growth over several crawls is a reliable proxy for a company in build mode with loosening budget.

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How to use Employee Growth Signal?

The scenario. You run RevOps at a payroll and benefits platform for companies under 500 employees. Your product’s value scales with headcount, and your churn data says something useful: customers who were actively growing when they signed stay twice as long as ones that were flat. The goal. Stop treating all inbound-fit accounts equally, and build your outbound universe from companies that are demonstrably adding people, because every new hire is another payslip your product runs. The signal fires. Over six weeks, employee_growth fires four times for Fernwood Clinics, a healthcare group that was at 80 employees and is now at 96. No press release, no funding news, just steady, compounding hiring. What it tells you. One firing of this signal is noise; a single hire moves it. A repeated pattern is the tell. Sustained employee growth means onboarding pain, payroll complexity, and benefits administration are all getting worse at that company every month, which is precisely the pain you price on. The play.
  1. Build a “3-of-4” rule: only accounts where the signal fired in at least three of the last four periods enter the queue. This one filter removes most of the noise.
  2. Route survivors to an SDR sequence that names the growth plainly: adding sixteen people in six weeks means someone is doing benefits enrollment by hand.
  3. Prioritize by magnitude bucket, a 20% headcount jump at an 80-person company is a different conversation than 1% at a 5,000-person one.
  4. Pass the growth context to the AE so discovery starts from evidence, not guesswork.
Scale it. A scheduled pull from the Company Signals API with signal_name=employee_growth, filtered to your size band, feeds the cohort automatically. Your SDRs work a list that rebuilds itself every week. Why this works. Firmographics tell you who could buy. Repeated employee growth tells you whose problem is actively getting bigger, and those are rarely the same list.

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How to read it

Build phase

Repeated firing across crawls signals a company actively scaling teams.

Noise at scale

For large enterprises, a +1 change is statistically meaningless. Filter by magnitude bucket.

Composite fuel

Feeds expansion_signal and headcount_recovery, so even low-magnitude events have downstream value.

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Outreach playbook

Don’t alert on this alone. Use it as a filter: surface accounts with employee_growth in 3+ of the last 4 crawls, then enrich for fit.

Employee Size Band Upgrade

A company moved up a full Professional Network employee size band.

Headcount Recovery

Employee growth returned after a recent decline.

Jobs Open Increase

The number of open job postings increased.

Expansion Signal

A company is expanding into new markets while growing.

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