DeUnemployment · Data library

Who is really hiring — and how inflated the count is

Name: Hiring market structure: agencies, duplicates, concentration — 2026-09-14
Creator: DeUnemployment
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

We separate recruiters from employers, count the same job on several boards, and measure how concentrated hiring actually is.

Key figures

Measure
Agency / recruiter postings	6.2%	share of all postings
Same role on several boards	9.3%	cross-board duplicates
Distinct employers	408,086	cleaned names
Top-20 employer share	6.3%	HHI 4.4 — atomised market
Offer visa sponsorship	0.7%

Frequently asked

How much of the market is recruiters?

6.2% of postings come from agencies/staffing rather than the direct employer.

Is the ‘number of open jobs’ inflated?

9.3% of postings appear on more than one board, so raw counts overstate the number of distinct roles.

Is hiring dominated by a few giants?

The top 20 employers are 6.3% of postings (HHI 4.4) — a long tail, not a handful of giants.

Sources & citation. Measured across 6,564,432 job postings (no sampling) and 23,080 probed links. License CC BY 4.0. Data: JSON · CSV · data health · methodology.
Cite as: DeUnemployment, “Hiring market structure: agencies, duplicates, concentration — 2026-09-14”, https://deunemployment.com/data/hiring-market (2026-09-14).

More data

“Still listed” is a listing-age measure from the source publish date, not a verification that a role is open; link liveness is measured separately. Figures are regenerated monthly. Generated 2026-09-14.