257 Companies Posted on HN in October. Diff Roles, Not Names, for Clients

If you run an agency, HN's monthly "Who is hiring?" thread is a free list of startups with open reqs, but most of it is not a client list. October's final thread had 257 company posts. November's had 181 by Nov 4, two days after it went up on Nov 2.

The thread bans recruiting firms, so every post comes from the hiring company. The part worth pitching is much smaller: the same specific role, reposted, in a market where candidates outnumber openings. This piece shows how to find it.

What's in the Hacker News Who Is Hiring November 2026 thread?

November's thread (item 50338728) had 181 top-level company posts two days after it opened. October's final count was 257. Every post comes from a direct employer, because the thread header tells people to post only if they personally work at the hiring company, and it excludes recruiting firms and job boards by name.

Moderators enforce the rule. In August 2026 an HN moderator answered a borderline post by pointing to it. For a sourcer, this is the thread's most useful property: each post is someone inside the hiring company saying "I need this person," with no agency reposts mixed in.

Different tools give different counts, so don't build a strategy on one exact number. A Dev.to parse read October's thread at 244 posts on Oct 8 and 257 on Nov 4. Two Apify tools from the same developer used the Algolia API and counted 266 on both Oct 17 and Oct 25. The gap comes from which API you call and how you filter deleted or non-job comments. Think of October as roughly 250 to 266 companies.

The thread is also getting smaller. A 12-month tracker showed 378 to 412 company posts a month a year ago, against 232 to 261 now. Total comments dropped from 545 in May 2026 to 393 in September and 354 in October.

Why does a repost matter more now than it did in April?

When candidates outnumber openings, a role that is still open a month later is probably hard to fill, not short of applicants. In early October, HN had about 2.56 "Who wants to be hired?" posts for every company post.

2.56:1

Here's why that matters. In April the ratio was 1.2 to 1, so a repost could just mean too few people applied. A founder with a generic backend role might have had a thin inbox and posted again hoping for more volume. That founder had a reach problem, and agencies aren't the best fix for reach.

In October that founder posted into a thread with two and a half candidates for every company. If the same role shows up again in November, volume wasn't the problem. Either the role needs something specific (a rare stack, a domain, a seniority level that doesn't apply cold), or the founder has interviewed people and rejected them. In both cases the next step is a targeted search, and that kind of search is what an agency can charge a fee for.

This is the core of recruiting agency business development from this thread. You aren't selling more applicants. You're selling precision to someone who has just seen that volume doesn't work.

Should you diff company names or role titles?

Diff role titles. A company that posts every month is often always hiring. The real signal is one specific role title appearing two months in a row.

Company-level diffs mostly surface companies with a standing list of openings. One poster listed "ai research engineer, technical customer success managers" in August, October and November, and the rest of its roles changed from month to month. That pattern looks like a growing team filling roles as they open. It doesn't look stuck, and pitching it as stuck will fall flat.

Compare that with River, which posted "Staff Software Engineer (Elixir) | $200K-$250K" in both October and November. That's one role, the same title and the same band, still open after a month in a market full of candidates. Here, the repost is the signal.

Sort your diff into three tiers:

1. Same exact role title, both months. Highest priority. The founder tried and it didn't work.
2. Same company, overlapping but changed roles. Medium. Read the post closely for one title that stays constant.
3. Company posted once and dropped out. Lowest. They may have filled the role, or they may not have posted yet (see the timing note below).

Missing salary is a second filter, not a first one. About 70% of October posts (171 of 244 in the Oct 8 snapshot) had no parseable yearly range, so filtering on it alone keeps most of the thread. On a tier-one repost, though, it tells you which pitch to use. No published comp suggests a founder who hasn't benchmarked pay, so open with what the band is clearing at right now. A posted band like River's means the comp is public and the bottleneck is supply, so lead with people who have the stack.

There's also a counterexample. AREO, a Bremen company hiring a Rails engineering manager, says in its post that it already hired two backend developers through the thread. Some founders do fill roles from HN on their own. If a post says the thread worked for them before, move it down your list. That founder trusts the channel and won't be eager to pay a fee.

How do you build an HN Who Is Hiring scraper and diff?

Pull both monthly threads from the free Algolia HN API, extract the company and role title from each top-level comment, and match on role title in the second week of the month. It's a short script, and existing tools can do most of the work.

The Algolia HN API needs no key. Two requests return the whole comment tree for a thread. If you'd rather not write code, Apify has ready-made HN scrapers. One reports extracting the company name from 98 to 99% of October and November posts. hnhiring.com is there if you only want to spot-check.

A workable process:

1. Wait until the second week. November's 181 was counted two days in. October grew from 244 to 257 after its first week. If you diff too early, companies that simply haven't posted yet will look like they dropped out.
2. Pull both threads. October's final thread and November's thread (item 50338728).
3. Parse the first line. Where a post uses a pipe-separated header, split on the pipes and keep company, role and salary.
4. Normalize role titles. Lowercase them, remove seniority punctuation, and treat "Sr." and "Senior" as the same. Leave stack words in, because "Elixir" is the whole signal.
5. Match on company plus normalized role. Any exact match is tier one.
6. Flag missing salary. Add it as a column. Don't filter on it.
7. Read every tier-one post by hand. Look for notes like AREO's that say the thread has already worked for them, and for any named hiring manager.

You'll end up with a short list out of roughly 250 companies, and that's the point. A short list with evidence beats 250 cold names.

How do you turn a repost into a pitch?

Lead with candidates, not a capabilities deck. A founder who reposted a role already has plenty of applicants. What they lack is the specific person, so the pitch that works names two or three people who fit.

Supply varies a lot by market, so check your numbers before you promise anything. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, 4,471 people in the US currently hold the title "Founding Engineer." San Francisco is the most common region in the top-25 sample (5 of 25), and sample employers include Orbit, Erebor, Sazabi and Arena. The UK has 702, with London accounting for 15 of the top 25, at companies like Tracebit, Cursive and RunLocal AI. The US pool is 6.4 times larger, and the UK pool is concentrated in one city.

4,471

The employers in those samples double as a BD source. Check Sazabi, Erebor, Tracebit and Cursive against both HN threads. If one of them is posting again, you already know what its last founding hires look like.

A first message that works for a tier-one repost has three parts:

• The observation. "You posted the staff Elixir role in October and again in November."
• The evidence. "I found three engineers with production Phoenix experience and recent public commits. Two are in your time zone."
• The ask. "Happy to send profiles on a contingency basis, or tell you what this band is clearing at right now."

The evidence line is the hard part, and it has to arrive fast. You need a credible shortlist for River's Elixir role before someone else calls River, and keyword search won't surface people whose Elixir work shows up mainly in their commits. That's the gap Refolk is built for: you describe the person in plain English and get a ranked shortlist.

Are other agencies already mining this thread?

Probably fewer than you'd guess. Agencies can't post in the thread, and most US staffing-firm recruiters seem to work outside tech. Treat this as a working hypothesis, not a fact.

Refolk's index has 28,698 people with Recruiter or Technical Recruiter titles at US staffing and recruiting firms. That's about 112 for every company that posted on HN in October. It sounds like a crowded field. But the top employers in the 25-person sample are healthcare staffing firms like RCM Healthcare Services and Coast Personnel, and TEKsystems is the only IT staffing name. Twenty-five people is a small sample. It still suggests that much of the agency workforce isn't reading HN for leads.

The posting ban has a second effect. Agencies can't show up in the thread, so any outreach has to happen off-platform. Don't reply to posts asking for the req. That breaks the spirit of the rule, everyone can see it, and founders remember. Find the person behind the post and contact them directly. Some posts include an email address. Many name only the company. If all you have is "Better Stack" or "Paradromics," asking Refolk for the CTO or head of engineering at that company is quicker than piecing it together from a team page.

Company size matters too. November's posters include startups like Better Stack and large organizations like Meta Central Security. Big companies with internal TA teams rarely buy from a cold agency pitch. Focus on the startups.

FAQ

When does the HN "Who is hiring?" thread go up each month?

It goes up on the first weekday of the month. November 1, 2026 was a Sunday, so the November thread (item 50338728) was posted on Monday, Nov 2. Posts keep arriving for more than a week. October's count rose from 244 to 257 after its first week, so run month-over-month comparisons in the second week.

Can agency recruiters post in Hacker News's hiring thread?

No. The header says only people who personally work at the hiring company may post, and it names recruiting firms and job boards as excluded. A moderator enforced the rule in August 2026. You can read the thread and use it for business development, but contact companies directly rather than replying to their posts.

How many companies posted in October 2026?

It depends on the tool. A Dev.to parse counted 257 top-level posts in the final October thread. Two Apify tools using the Algolia API counted 266. Differences in API and in how deleted or non-job comments are filtered explain the gap, so "roughly 250 to 266" is the honest range.