Three days, three different top fives
League tables of employers are usually dull because they barely move. This one moved twice in 48 hours. Okta and Block have dropped out entirely; Databricks left on the 7th and returned on the 8th; and two names that were nowhere on the 6th are now second and fourth.
The direction is as interesting as the movement. Rippling went from 73 live roles to 114 in one day, and Anthropic from 72 to 98 — while Stripe, still the largest, fell from 174 to 123 across the same window. The biggest hirer in the aggregate is contracting while the fastest climbers are an AI lab and an HR platform.
| Employer | 6 Aug | 7 Aug | 8 Aug | Two-day change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | 174 | 155 | 123 | −29% |
| Rippling | — | 73 | 114 | +56% in a day |
| Datadog | 130 | 91 | 102 | −22% |
| Anthropic | — | 72 | 98 | +36% in a day |
| Databricks | 85 | — | 91 | +7% |
| Okta | 82 | 70 | — | out of the top five |
| Block | 77 | — | — | out of the top five |
Why we will trend this, having refused to trend salaries
Yesterday this desk retired day-over-day salary comparisons, after publishing a British finding that reversed itself in twenty-four hours. It is fair to ask why employer counts get treated differently.
Because they are a different kind of number. An advertised median is computed over only the listings that disclose pay — a small, self-selected subsample, so a handful of new ads can swing it wildly. An employer's live count is a census: every listing we hold for that company, counted. Nothing is inferred and nothing is sampled. A census of hundreds moves when the world moves; a median of a dozen moves when the dozen changes. That is the whole distinction, and it is why one is publishable as a trend and the other is not.
The same shape, at global scale
What we are seeing in five rows is the local edge of something much larger. AI job postings finished 2025 running 134% above pre-pandemic levels while overall tech postings sat 34% below them. The share of tech postings naming at least one AI skill went from 15% in January 2024 to 73% in May 2026, and roles with AI in the title rose 173% year on year in the first quarter of 2026. Analysts have taken to calling it two parallel realities.
The two climbers fit that story precisely. Anthropic carried 1,095 active job postings in 2026, more than double the year before, and is among the most aggressive net hirers in the industry. Rippling has grown to roughly 5,000 staff from 3,600 in 2024, announced 150 new Dublin roles to build out its EMEA base and is doubling its India headcount toward 2,000. Neither is a surprise once you look up from the table.
What to take from it
If you are searching: the fastest-growing employers in a market are rarely the most famous ones, and a league table two days old is already wrong. Watch the climbers, not the leader.
If you are hiring: you are competing for engineers against companies that added forty roles in a day. Speed of process is now part of your offer, whether or not you intended it to be.
Every market figure here is a page you can open. Start with the market by city and read your own.
Earlier editions
- · 7 min readHealth care and social assistance out-hired the whole US economyIn the twelve months to September 2026, health care and social assistance added 520,400 jobs to American payrolls, and the whole economy added 496,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures published on 2 October 2026. The survey’s twelve sectors add up to the total, so every other sector together lost 24,400 jobs over the year: private employers outside health care and social assistance added 191,600, and government lost 216,000, with federal employment down 232,000. Health care alone added 371,800, three quarters of the economy’s gain. Information lost 120,000 jobs and financial activities 107,000. September itself added 29,000, and payrolls fell in four of the twelve months.Read the analysis
- · 8 min readAustralia’s unemployed per vacancy is below any pre-2021 quarterAustralia had 2.2 unemployed people for every job vacancy in August 2026, by the desk’s count from two Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys. In the 162 quarters with a figure from 1979 to 2020, the lowest was 2.5, in February 2008; all 21 quarters below 2.2 came after May 2021. The ratio is rising again: it was 2.0 a year earlier, and the number of unemployed rose by 80,000 while vacancies barely moved. Vacancies, at 325,000, are still 46% above August 2019, when the ratio was 3.2. In seven of the eight states and territories the ratio is lower than in August 2019; Queensland went from 4.3 to 2.0, and the one rise, in the Australian Capital Territory, is within the survey’s margin of error.Read the analysis
- · 9 min readA Luxembourg jobseeker keeps under a tenth of new payA single person who leaves unemployment benefit for a job paying two thirds of the average wage ends up better off by 9.35% of the job’s gross pay in Luxembourg and by 46.24% in Ireland, according to Eurostat’s figures for 2025, published on 1 October 2026. The rest, 90.65% and 53.76%, goes in the tax and social contributions the job brings and the benefits that stop. Ten of the 27 member states take more than 80%; the European Union as a whole takes 74.5%. The figures come from a tax and benefit model applied to one illustrative person, not from a survey, and they can be compared only from 2024, when the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre took the calculation over from the OECD. Between 2024 and 2025 the rate rose most in Italy, by 4.14 points, and fell most in Slovenia, by 3.09.Read the analysis
