Everyone tracks competitor pricing. Nobody tracks competitor hiring, and that’s the miss that costs the most time. This Redditor, u/Professional-Rest138, noticed the gap and built a scheduled AI agent to close it, posted over in r/PromptEngineering.
Here’s the logic. Three new sales roles plus a partnerships lead almost always means a distribution push is coming. A compliance hire usually means the company is about to move into regulated territory. By the time a press release confirms either one, the window to react has already closed. Job listings are public and updated in real time. A press release is curated and shows up months later, after the decision’s already been made.
The idea behind the setup: a scheduled AI agent reads your competitors’ job listings and websites every Monday. Then it hands you a short brief before your coffee’s even cold. All it takes to get started is a list of competitor names and about ten minutes.
I like this one because it’s not clever for the sake of clever. It’s just paying attention to a signal that’s public, updated constantly, and almost nobody checks on purpose.
🔍 Old Way vs. New Way
The old way looks like this: you remember to check a competitor’s careers page every few weeks, if you remember at all. You catch the sales hiring spree three months in, right around the time they announce the partnership you should’ve seen coming. By then you’re reacting instead of planning.
Picture a competitor posting three sales engineer roles and a channel partnerships manager in the same week. That combination alone suggests a partner program is coming, weeks before anyone announces it. That’s the kind of pattern this setup is built to catch.
The new way flips the order. One prompt, run automatically, checks every competitor’s site and job board on the same day each week. It doesn’t forget. It doesn’t get busy. It doesn’t need you to remember it exists.
Here’s the exact prompt from the post:
Every Monday, check my competitors’ websites and job listings. Competitors: [list them].
For each: any new roles they’re hiring for and what that suggests they’re building, any pricing or product changes, anything new they’ve published.
Then flag the single most important thing across all of them that I should pay attention to this week.
Notice what it’s doing beyond job listings. It’s also scanning pricing changes and new publications, then forcing a single “most important thing” out of all of it. That last instruction matters a lot. Without it, you get a wall of updates every Monday. With it, you get one thing to actually act on.
Practical Steps
Setting this up takes maybe ten minutes.
- List your real competitors by name, not a vague category. The more specific, the sharper the output.
- Copy the prompt above exactly and drop your competitor list into the brackets.
- Schedule it to run every Monday morning, and pay close attention to how you schedule it.
That third step is where most people trip. The original poster flagged the one detail that breaks scheduled agents more than anything else: they need to run in the cloud, not locally. A local agent only fires while your laptop is open and awake. Close the lid over the weekend, and Monday’s run just doesn’t happen. Cloud scheduling runs on its own clock, no laptop required. That’s reportedly the single most common reason people say their scheduled agents never ran at all.
A few things worth doing once it’s live:
- ✅ Start with 3-5 direct competitors. A long list dilutes the “single most important thing” instruction.
- ✅ Read the brief before you open email. It’s built to be the first thing you see Monday.
- ✅ Treat compliance and executive hires as bigger signals than individual sales roles. Those tend to mark strategy shifts, not just headcount growth.
One commenter called it an ad. There’s a linked collection of 24 similar agent setups at the end of the post, so the skepticism isn’t baseless. But the prompt itself doesn’t need that link to work. Copy it, schedule it, and it runs the same either way.
Try It This Week
You don’t need a fancy tool to test this. Pick three competitors, paste the prompt into whatever scheduled-agent setup you’ve already got, and let it run once. If Monday’s brief surfaces even one thing you didn’t know, it paid for itself!
Check out the original thread for the full discussion. The post also links to the rest of the agent setups the author put together for other jobs you’d normally pay someone to do.
set up an agent that checks my competitors’ job listings every monday, because what a company hires for tells you what it’s about to do
by u/Professional-Rest138 in PromptEngineering