Analysis from the live market
The Market Desk
What the job market is actually doing — written from BabZituna’s own aggregated supply, not from surveys. Every figure links back to a live page you can check.
Latest analysis
A law changed who counts as unemployed in France.French unemployment reached 8.3% in the second quarter of 2026, its highest reading since the pandemic quarter of 2020. INSEE publishes something most coverage leaves out: a decomposition showing that people brought into the count by the 2023 full-employment law account for nearly half of the rise across six quarters. That is not the same as saying the rise is not real - the majority of it comes from a population the law never touched - and holding both facts at once is the whole of this piece.8.3%unemployment rate, second quarter of 2026 - a share of the labour force, and the highest reading since 2020+0.98points of increase across the six quarters since the law took effect - the total this piece decomposes+0.31of those points are attributed by INSEE to RSA recipients, whom the law newly registered as jobseekersRead the analysis →Earlier editions
- · 7 min readEurope’s unmet need for work is twice its unemployment.Eurostat counts 23.7 million people in the European Union with an unmet need for employment. 12.0 million of them are unemployed. The other 11.7 million are working part-time and want more hours, or want work and are not searching, or are searching and cannot start yet - and the unemployment rate, 5.7%, sees none of them. This is the third edition in a row about a number that leaves people out, and the first about the number built to count them.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readOne unemployed American per job opening. That is not full employment.The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 1.0 unemployed person per job opening in the United States - a ratio that has sat between 1.0 and 1.1 for eight straight readings. Yesterday this desk reported the British equivalent at 2.5. The gap is real. What the American number does not say is that anyone who wants a job can have one, and the same release explains why: in the very month the ratio read one-to-one, 7.4 million openings sat unfilled while employers hired 5.3 million people and let 1.8 million go.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readTwo and a half people per vacancy. That is not a queue.The ONS ratio of unemployed people to open vacancies has not moved from 2.5 since the July to September 2025 reading. It sounds survivable, and it does not describe anything a job seeker or a recruiter actually experiences. Here is what the number counts, what it leaves out, and why the plateau is not the good news it reads as.Read the analysis →
- · 6 min readA degree still gets you hired. It stopped getting you the job.Recent graduates are now unemployed at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole, for the first time in New York Fed data going back to 1990. That comparison has been read as a verdict on the degree. It is the wrong pair of numbers, and the right pair says something narrower and worse.Read the analysis →
- · 6 min readTwice the applications. Thirty per cent fewer offers.That is the arithmetic an international graduate now works under in the United States, and it is the number that does not make headlines. The one that does is the door: the share of full-time postings offering visa sponsorship has fallen from 10.9% to 2.6% in three years.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readMay was announced as 172,000 jobs. It is now 63,000.The figure moved twice, each time inside a release about a different month, and neither move got a headline of its own. Measured against the statistical agency’s published history of its own revisions, both moves are ordinary. That is the story: not a number that was wrong, but a correction nobody reads.Read the analysis →
- · 6 min readNobody is being fired. The door is just not opening.Stanford revised its early-career AI employment paper today. The gap for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations is now 19%, up from 16% in the November version. Read the six facts underneath it and the story is not the one the number will be used to tell.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readHiring AI was due to start explaining itself nine days agoOn 2 August 2026, software that screens job applicants in Europe was to become subject to the AI Act’s high-risk regime. That date passed quietly: the obligations now fall on 2 December 2027. The volume of applications that makes such software unavoidable did not get an extension.Read the analysis →
- · 6 min readLondon advertises no remote jobs. Birmingham advertises 79%.Two English cities, one labour market, one set of employment laws, and a 79-point gap in advertised remote work. The gap is not about the cities. It is about how many places we read to build each page — and the same artefact is sitting in every job-market dashboard you have looked at this year.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readEurope’s biggest tech job is not engineeringIn five of the eight European cities this desk broke down today, sales openings match or beat software engineering. Often the employer is the same American company that keeps its engineers at home.Read the analysis →
- · 6 min readThe top of the hiring table changed hands in 48 hoursRippling and Anthropic climbed past everyone but Stripe, whose live count fell 29% in two days. Which of our numbers move fast enough to trend, and which do not.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readEurope legislated pay transparency. Two months on, the ads still do not show the pay.Twenty-three of twenty-seven member states missed the deadline — and in the live market, whether a country passed the law barely predicts whether its job ads name a salary.Read the analysis →
- · 6 min readRemote work is not 15%. It is 0% or 90%, depending where you look.One average hides two markets that barely overlap — and a number that measures what employers disclose, not where people work.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readThe state of the job market, August 2026Salaries, remote work, the skills employers actually name, and who is hiring hardest — read from 3,500+ live openings across 41 cities.Read the analysis →
What the desk tracks
Every piece is written from these live streams — open them yourself; they are the same pages we read.
- Salaries by cityMedian advertised pay across 41 hubs, in local currency, refreshed continuously.
- Remote shareHow much of each market is flagged remote-eligible — and where the global pool surfaces.
- Skills in demandWhat employers actually name in listings, recognised against the ESCO vocabulary.
- Who is hiringThe employers holding the most live roles in the aggregated supply, right now.