Laand Hiring Index: Week of Nov 2, 2026

2% of the new roles we read describe high-agency work: ownership, ambiguity, building from zero. In the week of Nov 2, 2026, 123,955 new roles opened across 6,351 companies on the boards Laand tracks, and like-for-like, the pace of new roles fell 19% on the previous week. Customer Support moved fastest (+28%). The title gaining ground quickest was Substitute Teacher.

The numbers

• 123,955 new roles at 6,351 companies (−19% like-for-like on the previous week).
• 660,848 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.
• 16% still make a degree a hard requirement.
• 3% of new roles are AI roles by title.
• The median new role tops out at $85k (USD ranges).

The 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 was given to do. It cannot show whether they 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 standout roles of the week

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 all 7 from this week.

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 the week of Nov 2, 2026 it featured 113 roles from 90 companies across 7 editions. The signal behind most picks was 0 to 1 (65%), then proactiveness (47%) and ambiguity (44%). In their own words:

"This is a high-agency, AI-native role. You won't be running status meetings. You'll be deep in the product: building…"

— Principal Product Manager, Low Code Agents, UiPath

"FSI works to improve taste, reduce costs, strengthen markets, and accelerate the adoption of more sustainable foods. About…"

— Cambrian, Community & Operations Manager, Foodsysteminnovations

"We’re looking for a backend engineer with unusually strong engineering and design taste. You will work directly with the CTO to design, prototype, and productionize AI-powered systems from…"

— Founding Software Engineer - Backend, Hypercubic

Featured most often: Base Power Company (4), Nooks (3), Assembled (2), COBS Bread (2), Felix Technologies, Inc. (2).

Read the editions: Sun, Nov 8 · Sat, Nov 7 · Fri, Nov 6 · Thu, Nov 5 · Wed, Nov 4 · Tue, Nov 3 · Mon, Nov 2.

Where the demand moved

Growing fastest: Customer Support (+28%). Cooling: Product Marketing (−31%), Sales (−28%), Solutions & Sales Engineering (−28%). Product Marketing asks for high agency most often, in 15% of its new roles.

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.

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: 18% of job ads
• Autonomy: 14% of job ads
• Craft: 3% of job ads
• Ambiguity: 2% of job ads
• Ownership: 2% of job ads
• 0 to 1: 2% of job ads

Who opened the most roles

1. Allied Universal: 4,922 new roles, mostly Security
2. Accenture: 4,425 new roles, mostly Software Engineering
3. Cvshealth: 4,409 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
4. Lowes: 3,025 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
5. Dollartree: 2,632 new roles, mostly Customer Support
6. TJX: 1,894 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
7. JLL: 1,001 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
8. Globalhr: 906 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
9. Wells Fargo: 854 new roles, mostly Operations & Strategy
10. Toloka Ai: 835 new roles, mostly Content & Media

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 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 reads the public job boards of 15,030 companies every day, directly from their 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 14,003 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 123,826 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 9, 2026.