Osmanth Watch / Guides

How to get notified about new job or rental listings

Published 13 October 2026

Short answer: use the site's own saved-search alert if it has one. If it doesn't, point a page watcher at the page that lists the jobs or rentals and ask to be told about "new content mentioning" your words. It only reports lines that were not there at the start, and it matches whole words, which we had to fix after our own test showed it did not.

A new listing is time-sensitive in a way a price isn't. You want to hear about the flat or the role soon after it appears, and you don't want an email about the forty listings that were already there. There are three ways to get that.

The three ways

The site's own saved search. Many job boards and rental sites let you save a search and email you about new matches. It is the site telling you directly, and it can filter on things a program can't see on the page, such as distance, salary or number of bedrooms. If the site has it, use it.

A feed. Some pages offer an RSS or Atom feed of new listings, which a feed reader can follow. How to get notified when a website changes goes through feeds and the other options.

Watching the list page. When neither exists, a watcher reads the page that lists the listings on a schedule and tells you about new ones. This works on any public list. Its limit is what it can read from the page, and the rest of this guide is about that.

What a list-page watch does

The first reading is the starting point. Every listing on the page when you set it up counts as already seen, and none of them will email you.

After that, a watch on "new content" compares each reading with the last one and looks at the lines that were added. If you gave it words, only added lines that contain your words are reported, and a line that disappears is not reported. And because a change to a page is read twice, about ten minutes apart, before you are told, a listing that flickers in and out for one reading does not email you.

Many employers also describe each posting to search engines with hidden structured data, such as a posting date and an expiry date (Google's guide, schema.org). Osmanth Watch doesn't use that for lists. It works from the lines a visitor would see on the page.

Two kinds of word watch

There are two ways to ask for a word, and they behave differently.

• "New content mentioning" a word. It alerts when a new line containing the word is added. Use this for ongoing listings: a role, a city, a street.
• "The words … appear". It alerts when the words go from absent to present on the page, and only then. Put the words in quotation marks. Use it for a one-off event, such as a first listing for a role that doesn't exist yet.

The second kind has a trap, which is the same one as in how to monitor a webpage for changes. If the word is already on the page when you start, it is already true, and a second listing with the word will not email you. For a role that is advertised all the time, use "new content mentioning" instead.

Matching words, not letters

On 13 October 2026, before the fix, we tested "New content mentioning" with the word "Rust" on a page that already had three listings, one of which was "Trust & Safety Analyst". When the page gained a line, "Trust & Safety Lead", the watch reported it as "New content mentioning “Rust”: “Trust & Safety Lead”". It matched the letters, not the word. The same happened with "Java" and a new line, "JavaScript Developer". That is the wrong answer, because it fills your inbox with listings you didn't ask for, and we fixed it the same day.

The check now looks for whole words. After the fix, on 13 October, a new line "Trust & Safety Lead" no longer matched "Rust", and neither did "Rustic Bakery Manager" or "JavaScript Developer" for "Java". "Senior Rust Engineer" and "Rust-based tooling lead" still matched "Rust", as did "Hiring engineers now" for "Engineer". An ordinary plural counts as the same word, a longer word does not: "Engineering manager" did not match "Engineer". A keyword in Chinese still matches inside a sentence, because those scripts have no spaces to anchor on.

The "words … appear" watch has always worked this way. On small pages it read “Rust” as not on the page for "Trust & Safety Lead" and "Rustic Bakery Manager", and as on the page for "Senior Rust Engineer" and "Rust-based tooling lead". It differs from "new content mentioning" only in what it reacts to: the words becoming present, rather than new lines that contain them.

If a short word keeps catching things you don't want, make the word more specific, or use a phrase that only your listings would contain.

What we tested

Readings from the live product on 10 October 2026, run from the same network as the production server:

• Hacker News jobs page. "tell me when this page changes" gave "Meaningful content change", with a starting reading of "97 lines (2,789 characters) of content". Adding the word "Python" turned it into "New content mentioning “Python”". The sentence "tell me when a new job mentioning “Rust” appears" was understood as the other kind: "“Rust” appears", with the reading "“Rust” not on the page".
• Mozilla careers listings. "134 lines (3,505 characters) of content". With "Engineer" added, it became "New content mentioning “Engineer”".
• A remote-jobs category page (We Work Remotely). "tell me when a new job is posted" was understood as "Alert when the list of jobs changes", with "656 lines (10,971 characters) of content".
• A rental portal (Rightmove). The address we tried read as "36 lines (1,510 characters)". That is too small to be a list of properties, so we don't count it as a rental search that works. It shows only that the address can be read.
• A classifieds search page (Craigslist, rentals search). It answered "No text content found in the watched area" and did not set up a watch. That usually means the list is drawn by the page's scripts after it loads, but we did not confirm that for this page.
• A government jobs site (Civil Service Jobs). The title it came back with was "Quick Check Needed", and the starting reading was "4 lines (139 characters) of content". That is a check page, not the job search, and on 10 October the product still said it could check the page reliably. We fixed that on 13 October: the same address is now refused with "This site shows an automated-traffic check instead of the page, so we would never see the real content." When a reading is as small as that for a page that should list jobs, don't start the watch.

On 13 October 2026 we also ran the product's own decision code on made-up pages. They are the source of the match results above. They also showed that a line that disappears alone produced no alert, and that a plain "this page changes" watch reported "The page content changed: 1 line(s) added, 0 removed" and held it for a second look.

We did not get a rental search-results page that worked, so we can't show you a rental watch reading real listings.

Limits to plan for

• Once a day. On the free plan the page is read once a day. In a market where a good listing is gone within hours, this is a way to catch slow listings, not to win a race.
• Public pages only. If you have to sign in to see the list, we say we can't watch it.
• Pages built after loading. Some lists are drawn by the page's scripts. Some of those we can still read by loading the page fully, and some we can't. We tell you at setup when there is nothing to read.
• Sites that refuse programs. We respect a site's request to stay away, and tell you rather than start a watch that can't work.

Starting one

Paste the page that lists the jobs or rentals on the home page, say what you're after, for example tell me when a new job mentioning “Python” appears, and read the starting reading before you give an email address. If it is a handful of lines for a page that should be a long list, you are probably looking at the wrong page. The limits are written out in the terms.