Layoffs are one of the best signals in recruiting. When a company lets people go, skilled candidates hit the market fast, and whoever reaches them first wins. The problem is that layoff news is scattered across LinkedIn posts, tech blogs, and press releases, and checking all of them manually every day is not realistic.
Meet Priya. She is an independent technical recruiter placing software engineers and product managers at mid-sized companies. She is good at her job, but she kept losing candidates to bigger agencies that seemed to hear about layoffs before she did.
The Problem: Always a Step Behind
Priya would see a layoff announcement on LinkedIn, then spend an hour piecing together which roles were cut, which cities were affected, and which companies might be hiring those same skills now.
By the time she had a clear picture, two or three days had passed. Other recruiters had already messaged the best candidates. She needed a way to get that information earlier, and without spending an hour every morning digging for it.
How She Set Up AIDular
A friend mentioned AIDular, a tool that searches the web on a schedule and sends you a summary by email. Priya signed up for the free Lite plan and set up her first tracker in plain English.
Here is roughly what she typed:
"Search for tech company layoffs announced in the last 7 days. Include the company name, number of roles cut, which departments or job titles were affected, and the city or region. Also note if any of those companies' competitors recently posted new job openings."
She set it to run every Monday morning. By 8 a.m. each week, a clean report landed in her inbox before she had opened a single browser tab.
What the Weekly Report Looks Like
Each email gives her a short list of layoff announcements from the past week. For each one, it notes:
- The company and how many people were let go
- Which teams were hit (engineering, product, sales, and so on)
- The location, so she knows which talent pool is now available
- Any public signals that competitors are hiring in the same area
She does not have to click through five articles. The summary is already sourced and ready to act on.
The Result
Within a month, Priya had changed her Monday routine completely. Instead of spending the morning searching for news, she spent it writing outreach messages to candidates she had already identified from her AIDular report.
She placed two engineers within six weeks of a mid-sized fintech layoff, both of whom said she was the first recruiter to contact them. That timing came directly from hearing about the layoff on Monday morning rather than Wednesday afternoon.
She also started a second tracker for a slightly different angle:
"Find recent news about companies in the US that have received Series B or Series C funding and are expected to grow their engineering or product teams."
That one runs monthly and gives her a list of companies likely to need help hiring soon, before they even post the roles publicly.
Why This Works
Layoff news and funding news are both public. They are out there. The bottleneck is the time it takes to find, read, and summarise them across dozens of sources every week.
AIDular handles that part. Priya just reads the email and decides where to focus her energy.
She still does the actual recruiting work, the relationship building, the calls, the negotiation. She just does it with better information and better timing than she had before.
If you recruit and spend time each week manually scanning for hiring signals, it is worth trying a scheduled tracker. You can set one up in plain English at aidular.com. The Lite plan is free, no credit card needed.