Skip to content

WorkWingman — Job Signals (Plain Language)

Two extra clues WorkWingman can show you about a job posting — both built with one hard rule: only use information that's legally public, or read straight off a page you already opened yourself. No sneaking around, no bulk scraping, no risking your LinkedIn account.

Clue 1 — Has this job been reposted, and when did it first go up?

The idea: sometimes a job listing that looks brand new has actually been sitting around for months — the company just "reposted" it to bump it back to the top of search results. If WorkWingman can see that, it can warn you: "heads up, this one's been reposted 4 times — it might be a phantom listing, or just a slow hire."

Why we can't just look this up everywhere: LinkedIn doesn't offer any public, official way to ask "how many times has job X been reposted?" The only way to get that answer at scale would be to scrape LinkedIn's pages over and over — which breaks LinkedIn's rules and could get your account suspended. We already flagged that risk before, and we're not doing it.

What we do instead: WorkWingman already opens a job's page in your browser to read the title, company, and description — that's the normal saved-jobs flow you already use. While it's there looking at that one page, it also reads whatever repost/date text LinkedIn itself is already showing on screen — the little "Reposted 3 times" or "Posted 2 weeks ago" label under the job title. It's not asking LinkedIn for anything extra, not visiting any extra pages, and not doing this any more often than you already browse your saved jobs.

What you'll actually see:

  • How many times reposted — when LinkedIn shows this, you'll see the number.
  • The original post date — LinkedIn is honestly bad about showing this separately from "reposted 2 weeks ago." Most of the time this will be blank, and that's expected, not a bug.
  • "Posted X ago" — the everyday freshness text you're used to seeing.

If none of that is visible on the page, WorkWingman just shows nothing for this — it never guesses or makes up a number.

The line we won't cross: this only ever reads the one page you already opened. If anyone ever suggests turning this into "revisit every saved job every hour to check for updates" or "crawl search results in bulk," that crosses back into the scraping territory we're deliberately avoiding.

Clue 2 — Has this company had layoffs recently?

The idea: before you spend hours tailoring a resume for a company, it helps to know if they've had recent layoffs — when, how many people, and what share of their workforce.

Where this comes from — all legally published, official sources, nothing scraped:

  1. State WARN notices. By federal law, companies with 100+ employees have to formally notify the state before a big layoff, 60 days in advance. States publish these as public record. Texas publishes theirs as clean, structured public data (through the official Texas Open Data Portal), so that's the one we pull from directly today. Other states (California, New York, Washington) publish the same kind of notices, but only as downloadable spreadsheets or a dashboard you'd have to click through by hand — not something a program can query cleanly yet.

  2. SEC filings. Public companies are legally required to disclose big layoffs to the SEC. The SEC provides a free, official search tool for these filings, and WorkWingman uses it exactly as intended — no login needed, no scraping, just the government's own public search.

  3. layoffs.fyi (the well-known tech-layoff tracker website). We looked into this one closely. Its creator says the data is "free to use with credit" for articles and research, but there's no public download, no API, nothing a program can pull automatically — only a manual "email me for a data export" option. Since the only way anyone gets bulk data out of that site automatically is by scraping it (without permission to redistribute), WorkWingman doesn't do that. This source is wired up and ready to go, but today it always comes back empty — on purpose, not by accident. If we ever get a proper data-sharing agreement with the site, this is where that would plug in.

What you'll see: for a company, WorkWingman shows its layoff history — most recent first — with the date, how many people, what percent of the workforce (when that number is knowable), and where that fact came from (so you can double-check it yourself).

A couple of honest caveats:

  • The workforce-percentage number isn't always available — sometimes it's buried in the wording of a company's official filing rather than in a clean data field, so WorkWingman leaves it blank rather than guessing.
  • Private companies without SEC filings, and companies outside Texas's WARN system, will sometimes show no layoff history at all — that means "nothing found in our current sources," not "definitely no layoffs ever happened."