Tech Job Postings Index — US & Europe

What’s in the file

17 columns over 95,760 rows. Distinct counts and null rates are measured from the file itself, not estimated.

Things worth noticing

• Software is not tracking the wider job market — it is diverging from it. US postings across all sectors sit at 101.9, just above the February 2020 baseline, while US software development sits at 74.6. In Germany the gap is far wider: 104.4 for all sectors against 50.0 for software, which is half the pre-pandemic level.
• US software postings peaked at 233.8 on 28 February 2022 and are now 68.1% below that. The peak was more than twice the pre-pandemic baseline, so the fall is a return past normal rather than a return to it.
• The US and Europe are moving in opposite directions right now. US software postings are up 8.0 points year on year, while Germany is down 9.6 and France down 6.7 — an American market that has begun recovering against European ones still contracting.
• Within tech the damage is uneven. In the US, Data & Analytics sits at 60.7 and is 70.1% off its peak, worse than software development at 74.6, while IT Systems & Solutions has held up best at 73.3. Whatever is happening is not uniform across technical work.

Put an agent on it

Anything you were about to do with this file by hand is a job that runs every week forever. Each of these is a working prompt — open it and it is already loaded.

Every Monday, read the tech job postings index for the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France.

For each country and each of the three technology sectors, report:
- The current index and its change over the trailing 4 and 13 weeks
- The year-on-year change in points
- How far the series sits below its own peak

Then flag only the genuine turns: a series whose 13-week direction has reversed sign, or which has crossed 100 in either direction, or whose year-on-year change has crossed zero. Ignore day-to-day movement — this is a daily series and most of its variation means nothing.

Write five sentences with the numbers inline, leading with whichever market moved most decisively. State plainly that these are index values against February 2020 and not counts of jobs.

Each quarter, compare our hiring funnel against the tech job postings index for the markets we recruit in.

Pull our own numbers — roles opened, applications received, offers made, offers accepted, time to fill — and set them beside:
- The index for Software Development in each market we hire in, and its year-on-year change
- The same for Data & Analytics and IT Systems & Solutions where we hire those roles
- The All sectors baseline for the same country, so the tech-specific effect is separated from the general one

Answer one question directly: is our time to fill moving with the market or against it? If applications per role are up while the index is down, that is the market loosening and not our employer brand improving. Say which it is, with the numbers behind it.

I will name a country we are considering hiring in.

Using this dataset, brief me on it:
- Current index for each technology sector, and for all sectors, with the year-on-year change
- Where the series sits against its own peak and its own trough since 2020
- How its trajectory over the last two years compares with the markets we already hire in
- Whether tech postings are recovering ahead of, behind, or in line with the wider market there

Close with three sentences on what this means for hiring difficulty, and be explicit about what the data cannot tell us — it is a postings index, so it speaks to demand for people and says nothing about salary levels, notice periods or the supply of candidates.

Load it yourself

The file is a plain parquet. Nothing here is specific to us.

-- No download step: DuckDB reads the parquet over HTTP range requests.
INSTALL httpfs;
LOAD httpfs;

CREATE VIEW tech_job_postings_index AS
SELECT * FROM read_parquet('https://cotera.co/datasets/tech-job-postings-index.parquet');

SELECT * FROM tech_job_postings_index ORDER BY observed_on LIMIT 20;

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