When a bank wants its analysts using AI, it writes that into the job description. When Italy passes a pay transparency law, salary ranges start appearing in Italian listings. When a soccer club decides to compete on data, it posts a job for a data engineer.
Each posting is a public record of what an employer intends to do next.
Collected and standardized at scale, these postings become job posting data: the job ads employers publish on their own career sites, on job boards, and through staffing firms, organized so you can count them, compare them, and follow them over time. Each posting tells you who's hiring, for what, where, how senior, with which skills, and often for how much.
We work with posting data every day at Revelio Labs. Below are some of our favorite uses, including findings that Forbes, CNBC, and Fast Company have cited.
Get a read on the economy a month early
The official count of US job openings comes from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). It's built from about 21,000 establishments, response rates have slipped to the mid-30% range from about 60% in the 2010s, and the data arrives with a lag.
In our look back at the first year of Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS), active postings tracked JOLTS openings closely, with both roughly 40% below their 2022 peaks, and posting volumes showed the trend about a month earlier. Our September jobs report had active postings down 1.8% from August, with 11 of 16 industries falling.
Watch a law land in real time
Postings let you track how employers respond to a new policy month by month.
With Syndio, we tracked pay transparency country by country across the EU by checking how many postings include a salary range. In January 2022, just 2.1% did. By August 2026, it was 30.4%. Italy went from 28.6% in April to 48.0% in September after its posting law took effect. France and the Netherlands also jumped in June without any new national law, which suggests some employers moved ahead of the requirement.
Find out what a job really asks for now
Job titles change slowly. The requirements listed in a posting show how the work itself is shifting.
We analyzed 75 million tech job postings since 2024 and found the average skills list shrank from about 30 to 21, while required experience crept up from about 4.6 to 4.8 years. Data organization and research roles went from asking for about 2 years of experience in 2023 to 5. Employers are asking for fewer, more specific skills from more experienced people.
Count AI adoption by what companies hire for
Job postings are a practical way to measure AI adoption, because they show whether a company is hiring people to build or use it.
Our AI Labor Market Tracker flags a company as an AI adopter when it starts posting jobs for AI integrator roles. We used postings the same way in our analysis of junior hiring at banks: 8.6% of junior bank postings in Q1 2026 mentioned AI, compared with 6.5% across the rest of the economy. For senior roles, it was 16.4% versus 9.2%.
Postings can also test the claims companies make. When we asked whether AI is just a scapegoat for layoffs, we measured each company's AI adoption by the share of its postings for roles that build or use AI. Some of the companies citing AI in their layoff announcements had trailed their industries in adoption.
Keep an eye on the first rung of the ladder
US entry-level job postings are down about 35% since early 2023, a figure Fast Company and CNBC both cited this year. Entry-level roles are where new graduates feel a slowdown first. Postings alone can't separate the effect of AI from a broader hiring slowdown, though they do show where the drop is concentrated. For the graduates' side of the story, our team also asked whether 2025 was really the worst year to graduate.
Spot listings that may never become hires
Many job seekers apply for roles and never hear back. Hires per posting fell from 0.75 in 2018 to below 0.5 in 2023, a finding Forbes used to explain why the old job-search playbook isn't working. Reposted openings and listings left up with no real plan to hire both contribute. For this reason, we weight each posting by the number of hires it is likely to produce.
Settle a sports argument
Every NBA and MLB team now has at least one data professional on staff, and the skills they hire for vary by sport. In our sports analytics deep dive, baseball postings asked for statistics skills more than any other league's, while soccer postings showed the highest demand for AI, machine learning, and data engineering.
More questions to try
- Is a competitor building a sales team in Europe? Count its sales postings by country.
- Is remote work quietly fading in your industry? Track the share of postings that allow it.
- Which skills do employers want before universities teach them? Compare new skill mentions in postings with course catalogs.
- Is a company about to open an office somewhere new? Look for a cluster of postings in a city where it barely has anyone.
- Which roles is a company struggling to fill? Watch for the same posting coming back month after month.
Raw postings need cleaning first
The same job shows up on several sites at once. Openings get reposted. One company's customer success manager is another company's client partner. Counting raw listings produces numbers that move for reasons unrelated to hiring.
COSMOS, our job postings dataset, handles that cleanup. It covers 5.6 billion current and historical postings from 1.3 million sources in 195 countries. Every posting is deduplicated, mapped to an occupation, seniority level, and location, and tagged with salary, skills, remote-work suitability, and expected hires. It updates every day.
If you have a question about a company, an industry, a policy, or a skill, there is a good chance a job posting can help answer it. Explore the job posting data in COSMOS.