Aaron’s Untitled Competitive Intelligence Presentation

Competitive intelligence for recruiting rarely gets taught, because most training focuses on the "soft" skills of sourcing and candidate conversations rather than the harder work of tracking competitors, labor markets, and general business context. What follows is a practical set of tools and search tricks for building that intelligence automatically, so information comes to you instead of requiring constant manual searching.

• Turning any search query into an RSS feed, using Google News searches, WordPress /feed endpoints, and feed generators for sites like Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube, and GitHub that don't offer native feeds.
• Filtering Glassdoor reviews by company, language, employment type, and location using URL parameters, so a search returns only relevant reviews instead of tens of thousands of unfiltered results.
• Configuring Google Alerts properly: excluding noisy sources like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Google News itself, then exporting results to an RSS feed for real-time delivery instead of throttled email digests.
• Finding competitors' proposal and slide templates by searching for copyright boilerplate text that appears at the bottom of their PowerPoints and PDFs.
• Monitoring public company filings through the SEC's Edgar system for real-time updates on earnings reports and major trades.
• Using visual-change monitoring tools to catch when a competitor's LinkedIn page crosses an employee-count threshold, or when their website's tech stack changes.
• Pulling social mentions from Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms through paid aggregators when native search options are limited or blocked.
• Building a feed reader setup that removes duplicate stories, translates foreign-language articles, tags specific authors or influencers by name, and routes filtered results into scheduled email digests for a team.
• Combining competitor names with topic keywords, such as paid-time-off policy changes, to answer specific internal business questions with sourced, real-world evidence rather than guesswork.

The larger point is about building a repeatable pipeline: pull in far more raw content than seems necessary, then filter aggressively for signal, tag it by relevance, and route it to the people who can act on it. None of the tools require a large budget, and several are free or cost only a small annual fee.