The company watchlist

Most jobs reach a job board eventually. Some never do. The watchlist reads employers' own careers boards directly, so those roles reach you anyway.

Following a company

The Watchlist page lists the companies available, each showing the applicant-tracking platform it uses and how many roles were open at the last read. Choose Subscribe to follow one and Unsubscribe to stop. That is the whole page — there is nothing else to configure and nothing else to get wrong.

The list is a curated catalogue rather than a search box. You follow companies that are already on it; you cannot add an arbitrary employer yourself. Boards are added by whoever runs Rolehound. Six platforms are supported: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Workday and BambooHR.

Postings still have to match your search titles

This is the part people are surprised by, so it is worth stating plainly. Following a company does not give you every role it advertises.

A company's postings are read into a shared cache. What reaches you out of that cache is filtered by your own search titles first — the same relevance bar the keyword searches already apply. Without it, following one large employer would bury everything else on your list.

The match is generous. Either string containing the other counts, ignoring case, so Product Manager matches a posting for Senior Product Manager, and a title of Analyst matches most analyst postings a company has open. But a company whose openings are all in a discipline you have not named will show you nothing at all, and that is the design working rather than a fault. If following a company produces nothing, look at your titles before anything else.

What happens after that

Matching postings join the same list as everything else and go through the same checks and the same scoring.

One thing to expect: careers boards very rarely state a salary. With a salary floor set, watchlist roles therefore tend to arrive flagged for review rather than dropped, because an unstated salary is never treated as a failure. That is the flag doing its job.

Following costs the company nothing to notice

Each board is read once for everyone who follows it, in the background, rather than once per follower. Following a company therefore tells that company nothing about you — there is no request carrying your identity, and there is nothing on their side to see.

The open-roles count

The number on each card is what the last read found on that board. Two things about it: it counts the whole board, not the part that matches your titles, so it will usually be larger than what reaches you. And it changes only when the board is next read, so it can be a little behind what the company's own site shows right now.