Bellwether hiring tracker

The broad job-posting indexes already exist. This tracks the employers whose hiring tends to turn first: open roles counted every day from their own job boards, grouped into cohorts with a stated hypothesis, and read against two control groups.

194,806
Open roles across all tracked boards: +119
Change since Nov 1, same boards: —
Change over 7 days, same boards: 261 of 261
Employers tracked

Collection began Nov 1; 2 days of record as of 2026-11-02. Changes compare only boards counted on both days, so a board joining the list never reads as hiring. Seven-day changes appear once a week of record exists.

Cohorts

Open roles on 2026-11-02. Each cohort states what its hiring is a bellwether for.

Cohort	Open	1 day	7 days	Trend	Boards
AI labs Frontier model builders. Their hiring is the labour side of the AI capital cycle; a freeze here would precede a capex pullback.	2,029	+7	—		9 employers OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, xAI, Thinking Machines, Magic, Poolside, Character.AI, and Isomorphic Labs
AI-native applications Companies whose product is an AI agent or assistant. Where the AI revenue thesis is tested first.	1,384	+1	—		9 employers Perplexity, Cursor, Harvey, Sierra, Cognition, Lovable, ElevenLabs, Replit, and Scale AI
AI compute and cloud GPU clouds, inference platforms and the chip supplier. Tracks data-centre build-out demand.	24,835	—	—	first days	10 employers CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda, Cerebras, Together AI, Baseten, Fireworks AI, Modal, NVIDIA, and Amazon
Semiconductors and chip equipment Classic early-cycle industry. Equipment makers cut hiring before global capex turns.	8,281	—	—	first days	6 employers Micron, Intel, Applied Materials, KLA, Broadcom, and GlobalFoundries
Enterprise software (control group) Established SaaS and developer tools. The baseline the AI cohorts are read against.	9,043	+95	—		22 employers Databricks, Figma, GitLab, Datadog, MongoDB, Cloudflare, Twilio, Linear, Notion, Zapier, Asana, Okta, Zscaler, Samsara, Dropbox, Supabase, Vercel, Salesforce, Adobe, Workday, HP, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Robotics and autonomous vehicles Humanoids, warehouse robots and driverless fleets. Hiring here is the hardware leg of the AI build-out.	1,354	-1	—		11 employers Waymo, Zoox, Nuro, Kodiak, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X, Physical Intelligence, Divergent, and Formic
Venture defense and space Venture-backed defense, space and drone makers. Leads the flow of defense appropriations into new entrants.	8,459	+2	—		14 employers Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, Saronic, Chaos Industries, Epirus, Helsing, Mach Industries, SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Varda, Planet Labs, and JetZero
Defense primes and federal contractors The incumbents on federal contracts. A hiring stop here is the first sign of a budget or procurement freeze.	12,162	—	—	first days	6 employers Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, GDIT, Leidos, and KBR
Crypto Exchanges, custodians and infrastructure. The most speculative hiring in the sample; it turns first in risk-off.	619	+10	—		13 employers Coinbase, Gemini, Ripple, BitGo, Fireblocks, Blockchain.com, Consensys, Anchorage Digital, Alchemy, Uniswap Labs, Paradigm, Ledger, and Circle
Consumer lenders and banks Lenders to households, including subprime auto. Watch the collections and loss-mitigation titles for consumer stress.	9,103	0	—		14 employers Affirm, Chime, Upstart, SoFi, EarnIn, Oportun, Mission Lane, Dave, Carvana, CarMax, Capital One, Ally, PNC, and Truist
Payments and business fintech Payment rails, business banking and brokerages. Transaction-volume businesses that hire with activity.	2,490	+4	—		10 employers Stripe, Block, Plaid, Robinhood, Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Carta, Toast, and PayPal
Restructuring advisers Turnaround and bankruptcy advisers. Their hiring rises months before the bankruptcy filings do.	290	—	—	first days	4 employers AlixPartners, Ankura, Houlihan Lokey, and PJT Partners
Housing and homebuilders Brokerages, proptech and homebuilders. The most rate-sensitive hiring in the economy.	667	—	—	first days	9 employers Compass, Orchard, HomeLight, Roofstock, Knock, Pacaso, Lennar, PulteGroup, and Taylor Morrison
Freight and logistics Carriers and freight platforms. A freight recession has led each goods recession.	1,390	0	—		10 employers Flexport, Uber Freight, project44, FourKites, Loadsmart, Arrive Logistics, Old Dominion Freight Line, Saia, C.H. Robinson, and Ryder
Industrial and power equipment Grid, turbine, automation and oilfield equipment. Capex for reindustrialisation and AI power demand.	3,504	—	—	first days	5 employers GE Vernova, Rockwell Automation, Baker Hughes, Chevron, and Duke Energy
Energy transition and new nuclear Batteries, geothermal, fusion, small reactors and EVs. Sensitive to policy and to the AI power story.	1,365	—	—	first days	13 employers Form Energy, Redwood Materials, Fervo Energy, Oklo, Kairos Power, Helion, Antora Energy, TerraPower, Valar Atomics, Pacific Fusion, Lucid Motors, Span, and Aurora Solar
Venture biotech and techbio Private and newly public drug discovery firms. Hiring stops the day the funding window closes.	279	—	—	first days	13 employers Xaira Therapeutics, Altos Labs, Arc Institute, Eikon Therapeutics, Generate Biomedicines, Formation Bio, Ginkgo Bioworks, Ultima Genomics, Profluent, Recursion, Inceptive, insitro, and Benchling
Large biopharma and tools (control group) Established pharma and life-science tools. The baseline for the biotech cohort.	5,460	—	—	first days	7 employers Moderna, Pfizer, Amgen, Gilead, Regeneron, Illumina, and Danaher
Media and creator platforms Publishers, newsrooms, audio and creator platforms. Ad-cycle sensitive and exposed to AI summarisation.	1,219	—	—	first days	11 employers The New York Times, Hearst, Axios, Vox Media, Semafor, Substack, Patreon, Morning Brew, Spotify, Disney, and iHeartMedia
Consumer internet and gig platforms Marketplaces, delivery, social and games. Discretionary demand and the gig labour market.	1,681	+1	—		11 employers Airbnb, DoorDash, Lyft, Instacart, Reddit, Pinterest, Discord, Roblox, Nextdoor, Duolingo, and Peloton
Travel, dining and discretionary retail Travel sites, hotels, restaurants and direct-to-consumer brands. The first spending households cut.	626	—	—	first days	9 employers Tripadvisor, GetYourGuide, Kayak, Sonder, Choice Hotels, Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Glossier, and Faire
Big-box frontline retail Store-level hiring at three national chains. Seasonal hiring intent and low-wage labour demand.	40,258	—	—	first days	3 employers Target, TJX, and Dollar Tree
Services exposed to AI substitution Customer-support software, online education, freelance marketplaces and IT services. Their own hiring shows displacement.	41,660	—	—	first days	9 employers Intercom, Coursera, Udemy, Upwork, Turing, Toptal, Andela, LivePerson, and Accenture
Healthcare staffing and providers Travel-nurse agencies, clinics and insurers. Healthcare has carried payroll growth; a turn here matters for jobs reports.	795	—	—	first days	5 employers AMN Healthcare, Aya Healthcare, One Medical, Oscar Health, and Ro
Staffing and hiring platforms Gig staffing, job boards, payroll and HR software. Hire with the hiring cycle itself.	412	0	—		6 employers Instawork, ZipRecruiter, Handshake, Justworks, Gusto, and Robert Half
U.S. federal government Open announcements on USAJOBS by department, plus the graduate hiring path. Federal hiring freezes show here first.	15,441	—	—	first days	22 employers Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, Department of the Air Force, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of the Treasury, Department of the Interior, Department of Agriculture, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Department of Commerce, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of State, Social Security Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and General Services Administration

What the titles say

Share of open roles whose title or location matches each signal, over the 183 boards that publish full listings (30,201 roles). Recruiter postings are cut first and restored first; early-career and AI shares track who is being hired; collections and restructuring titles rise with stress.

Early-career roles3.7%1,107
AI and machine-learning roles6.8%2,051
Recruiting roles1.7%503
Collections and loss-mitigation roles0.1%21
Restructuring and bankruptcy roles0.1%14
Remote roles9.8%2,972

More signals

Sales roles2,982 · 9.9%
Engineering and science roles12,623 · 41.8%
Trust, safety and fraud roles150 · 0.5%
Compliance and regulatory roles255 · 0.8%
Diversity and inclusion roles3 · 0.0%
Sustainability and climate roles8 · 0.0%
Data-centre roles206 · 0.7%
Contract, temporary and seasonal roles282 · 0.9%

Location, where stated: 76.7% of roles read as U.S. and 19.1% as outside the U.S.; the rest are unstated or ambiguous. Approximate, from free-text location fields.

Federal government

USAJOBS shows 15,441 open announcements across 22 departments, of which 109 on the recent-graduates hiring path.

Counts are the open postings on each employer's own public job board (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workday career sites, Amazon's job search and the USAJOBS API), read once a day with an identified user agent and kept in a hash-chained ledger. Workday sites report at most 2,000 in their total; where that cap binds, the count comes from the site's own job-family table. Postings do not equal hires: boards carry evergreen and duplicate requisitions, and a role can be reposted. Title signals are regular expressions over free text and are approximate. Company-level counts are not published here. Data as of 2026-11-02; classifier 1.0.0.