Job Market Signal — May 2026

April’s first full edition of this report covered 100,793 postings across 19 countries. May covered 363,296 across 110.

That jump is not a hiring boom — it is a wider lens. The crawl’s source footprint grew from 28 to 43 over the month, pulling in markets it had never seen and tripling the dataset. When you widen coverage like this, the headline numbers barely move. What changes is the texture: at this scale you can stop asking what the market hires and start asking what each market hires that the others don’t.

The bulk of the volume still sits in a dozen European markets and the United States; the other hundred countries are a thin tail. But that tail, and the deeper coverage of the markets we already saw, is enough to draw a clearer picture. This edition is that picture.

Every market has a signature

Over-indexing: how concentrated a skill is in one country versus the whole dataset.

Volume tells you France and the UK are big. It doesn’t tell you what makes them different. For that, the useful measure is over-indexing — how much more often a skill appears in one market than across the entire dataset. An index of 5× means a skill is five times more concentrated there than the global baseline.

Read that way, every market has a fingerprint.

Norway leans hard into social pedagogy (14.7×) and environmental remediation (13.8×) — a public-sector, care-and-climate signature. Germany over-indexes on mechatronics (5.7×), the engineering backbone of its industry. Switzerland concentrates on biomedical and clinical work; France on cosmetic dental and general medicine.

None of these are the largest categories in their countries. They are the structural signatures — and for a job seeker, the practical reading is simple: the market that rewards your specialty is not always the one next door.

The deadline came and went

The EU Pay Transparency Directive's transposition deadline was June 7. It has now passed.

Every member state was meant to write the Directive into national law by June 7, 2026. As May closed, none had finished. Against that backdrop, the postings tell an awkward story.

Globally, 38.2% of postings now disclose pay — up about two points. But the European-weighted figure fell to 30.3%, and the United States (62%) now discloses pay more often than Europe does — with no directive at all.

The mover is France. In April’s edition, French postings disclosed pay 75% of the time; in May, 67.9%. France carries the European average on sheer volume, so when France slips, the continent slips with it. The deadline meant to pull Europe toward transparency arrived with Europe drifting the other way.

That is the figure worth watching: whether the passed deadline pulls the laggards up over the summer, or whether it produced a scramble rather than a shift.

A narrow door for newcomers

Entry-level roles are 2.5% of the market. Mid-level roles are 81.7%.

Across all 363,296 postings, entry-level openings make up one in forty. For someone starting a career, that is not a matter of effort — the openings simply aren’t in the public posting stream. A career starter is competing for roughly one listing in forty.

It is tempting to read this as AI hollowing out the bottom rung. The data doesn’t support that story — at least not yet. Roles in data, AI, and analytics are 5.6% of the market, and the skills those postings ask for are conventional: reporting, stakeholder work, established tooling, not a wave of model-training jobs. “AI is taking the jobs” is not something this month’s postings can show. What they show is that entry-level work — AI-related or not — is mostly not advertised here. That is a different problem, and an older one.

Remote is a role, not a company

92.5% of May's postings are onsite. Remote barely moved — 4.8% to 5.5%.

The average hides the useful part. Remote work isn’t spread evenly across the market; it concentrates in particular kinds of work.

Marketing and content roles advertise remote at 13.2% — roughly twelve times the rate in hospitality. If remote work is non-negotiable for you, the role you target moves the odds far more than the company you target. The lever isn’t the employer’s policy; it’s the kind of work.

The lens is the baseline now

The wider view is no longer new. From here, the source footprint is steady — which means the next edition can measure real month-over-month movement instead of coverage growth.

Three things worth watching into summer: whether Europe’s pay transparency recovers now that the deadline has passed; whether entry-level openings appear or stay scarce; and whether the country fingerprints hold or shift as these markets settle into the dataset.

The Market Pulse dashboard updates continuously. This edition freezes the month and asks what it means.

Methodology: every figure comes from Kitsuno’s production crawl, classified by the Extractor agent using the ESCO skills taxonomy and an internal role-family scheme. The dataset covers 363,296 unique postings collected across May 2026 from 43 sources in 110 countries; 85.5% carry an identified location. Month-over-month comparisons against the April edition are directional only — April covered a shorter window with fewer sources, so the country and source mix differs.

For how the pipeline works, read How we measure job-market signal. For the live numbers, visit Market Pulse.