Laand Hiring Index: October 2026
11% of new roles now ask to see the work, not just the resume.
11% of the new roles we read ask for a portfolio, a work sample, a trial project or something the candidate has built. In October 2026, 423,970 new roles opened across 9,513 companies on the boards Laand AI tracks, but like-for-like, the pace of new roles fell 9% on the previous month. Product Marketing moved fastest (+40%). The title gaining ground quickest was Verification Engineer.
The numbers
- 423,970 new roles at 9,513 companies (−9% like-for-like on the previous month).
- 598,599 roles open today.
- 2% of new roles describe high-agency work.
- 1% ask for high agency or taste in so many words.
- 79% of those high-agency roles ask for no proof of work.
- 19% still make a degree a hard requirement.
- 2% of new roles are AI roles by title.
- The median new role tops out at $103k (USD ranges).
Hiring evidence gap
Of the roles that ask for high agency, 79% give candidates no way to show it beyond a resume. That is the gap at the centre of hiring right now. A resume lists what someone has done before. It cannot show whether they can spot the problem nobody assigned them, or solve it with the taste that makes the work stand out. And with AI writing a polished resume in seconds, the document is getting cheaper to produce and easier to ignore: infinite generated applications meeting automated rejection, while the trait the ad asked for never gets seen.
The month's standout roles
Every weekday, Laand's High-agency jobs digest opens on one standout role: the open job that most plainly asks for high agency and taste, in the company's own words. Here are the 9 of this month's 14 that make the case most clearly.
From the daily high-agency jobs
Beyond the standouts, every edition features the other open roles that most clearly ask for agency and taste, with the line from the ad that proves it. In October 2026 it featured 193 roles from 130 companies across published editions. The signal behind most picks was ambiguity (59%), then 0 to 1 (57%) and craft (42%). In their own words:
"We expect our PBPs to lead with high agency, and this role carries that expectation further than any other. You'll set the regional People…"
"This role requires both urgency and taste. You’ll move quickly as threats evolve, without compromising on reliability, craft, or the details that…"
— Product Manager, Radar - Fraud and Abuse Prevention, Stripe
Featured most often: airwallex (13), Ramp (5), Sierra (5), OpenAI (4), Evidence Action (4).
Where the demand moved
Growing fastest: Product Marketing (+40%), AI & ML Engineering (+28%), Sales Development (+22%). Cooling: Product Management (−31%), Customer Success (−25%), Solutions & Sales Engineering (−19%). Forward Deployed asks for high agency most often, in 22% of its new roles.
| Function | New roles | vs the previous month | Median top of range | AI roles | High-agency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operations & Strategy | 237,433 | −9% | $76k | 1% | 0.8% |
| Software Engineering | 42,843 | −13% | $179k | 0% | 3.2% |
| Sales | 30,329 | −6% | $75k | 1% | 2.5% |
| Customer Support | 13,536 | −3% | $56k | 1% | 1% |
| Finance | 12,964 | −16% | $125k | 1% | 2.4% |
| Growth & Marketing | 8,929 | −12% | $158k | 2% | 8.1% |
| Other | 8,363 | −14% | $140k | 2% | 1.5% |
| Hardware & Robotics | 7,560 | flat | $166k | 1% | 3% |
| Infrastructure & DevOps | 6,648 | −8% | $190k | 0% | 2.5% |
| Content & Media | 6,478 | −7% | $73k | 4% | 2% |
| AI & ML Engineering | 6,199 | +28% | $210k | 100% | 7.7% |
| Data & Analytics | 6,187 | −3% | $181k | 1% | 3.6% |
| Security | 6,047 | −3% | $185k | 4% | 2.5% |
| Product Management | 5,180 | −31% | $211k | 8% | 12% |
Titles on the rise
Titles are where a market shows what it is learning to need before the org charts catch up. These grew their share of new roles fastest, counting only titles hiring at three or more companies.
| Title | Function | New roles | Companies | Share growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verification Engineer | Software Engineering | 24 | 3 | +427% |
| Customer Service Specialist | Customer Support | 12 | 4 | +339% |
| Service Desk Analyst | Customer Support | 15 | 4 | +312% |
| Sales Development Manager | Sales Development | 14 | 11 | +284% |
| Full Stack Developer | Software Engineering | 60 | 6 | +266% |
| Integrated Marketing Manager | Growth & Marketing | 10 | 4 | +266% |
| Global Account Manager | Sales | 13 | 6 | +257% |
| Project Officer | Operations & Strategy | 14 | 4 | +207% |
| Content Creator | Growth & Marketing | 11 | 5 | +202% |
| Customer Support Specialist | Customer Support | 11 | 8 | +202% |
How employers describe the person they want
Few ads use one phrase. These are the ways they ask for high agency and taste, and how often each appears:
- Proactiveness: 19% of job ads
- Autonomy: 16% of job ads
- Craft: 4% of job ads
- Ambiguity: 3% of job ads
- Ownership: 2% of job ads
- 0 to 1: 2% of job ads
| Function | High-agency | Agency or taste, explicitly | No proof asked | Degree required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forward Deployed | 21.6% | 5.3% | 77.5% | 13.6% |
| Product Marketing | 12.6% | 4.3% | 82.3% | 15.6% |
| Product Management | 12% | 2.8% | 80.7% | 25.7% |
| Design | 11.8% | 5.4% | 31.8% | 15.9% |
| RevOps & GTM Engineering | 11.8% | 1.9% | 84.2% | 14.1% |
| Sales Development | 8.3% | 1.4% | 94.8% | 10.4% |
| Growth & Marketing | 8.1% | 2.5% | 76% | 17.6% |
| AI & ML Engineering | 7.7% | 2% | 77.5% | 28% |
| Recruiting & People | 7.4% | 1% | 90% | 17.9% |
| Partnerships & BD | 7.1% | 1% | 74.8% | 22.9% |
Who opened the most roles
- Accenture: 4,804 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Cvshealth: 4,685 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Microsoft: 3,386 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Northrop Grumman: 3,309 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Micron: 2,982 new roles, mostly Software Engineering
- Adventhealth: 2,914 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- TJX: 2,901 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Globalhr: 2,655 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Lowes: 2,609 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
- Dollartree: 2,600 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
What this means
If you are looking for your next role, most ads still will not say "high agency" out loud, which is exactly why showing it sets a candidate apart. Name the problem worth solving at the company and show the work, and the resume becomes the footnote it should be.
If you are hiring, an ad that asks for agency and a process that screens resumes are measuring two different things. The signal you want lives in executed work, so put the work in front of the decision.
Laand AI is the agent for high-agency talent with rare execution taste: it helps people prove what a resume cannot, and helps companies hire on that proof.
How we measure
Laand AI reads the public job boards of 14,432 companies every day, directly from their careers pages and applicant tracking systems, and keeps a structured record of every role it sees open and close. Open-role counts are a census of what is live on those boards. Growth figures compare like with like: only the 1,819 boards we were already tracking before the comparison period began, so new boards joining our coverage never read as market growth. A role counts as new on the date it was posted, not the day we first saw it. Salaries are medians of the top of each advertised USD range. Hiring signals — agency, taste, degrees, years of experience, proof of work — come from reading the full text of 411,000+ job descriptions, sentence by sentence, with no AI guessing; a role whose description we could not read is left out of those figures rather than counted as silent. Data as of November 1, 2026.
Show the work, not the resume.
Laand finds the problem worth solving at the company you want, then helps you ship the proof that you can solve it.
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