Aspen Technology Labs

08/06/2026

Interesting split in this week's hiring data.

AMD and Cloudflare are both cutting back on job postings, down 15.6% and 10.3% over the last 30 to 90 days, even though their stocks are up 169% and 33% over the past year.

Palantir's doing the opposite. Headcount is up almost 16% over the same stretch, but the stock is still down over 23% for the year.

McKesson and onsemi are the more boring (in a good way) cases, hiring and stock price both climbing together, up roughly 18% and 10% in postings alongside 20% and 70% stock gains.

Worth remembering hiring and stock price don't always move together, and this week's a good reminder of that.

Want the full breakdown for each company, live job counts, hiring trend, stock trend? Request a demo of JobMarketPulse, link in comments.👇

08/05/2026

Oregon's job market looked flat on the surface in Q2 2026. It wasn't.

In partnership with Oregon Business & Industry (OBI), Aspen Tech Labs released the Q2 2026 Oregon Jobs Report, built on our real-time job posting data.

Key findings:

- Postings rose 5.3% QoQ, over 5x the national pace, narrowing the YoY gap to -0.5% after a -10.4% low in Q1
- Hermiston-Pendleton surged 40.2% YoY, driven by Amazon's data center buildout
- IT postings jumped 41% YoY, mostly infrastructure roles, not traditional tech hiring
- AI-related postings nearly doubled YoY (+93%)
- Median full-time salary hit $65,520, now above the national median
- Nursing postings fell 11.1% YoY, a persistent soft spot

The takeaway: growth is tracking anchor employers and infrastructure investment, not broad-based demand.

Read the full report: https://oregonbusinessindustry.com/q22026jobsreport/

Want a state-level jobs report like this for your state? Let's connect.

Report covers advertised positions during the second quarter of 2026, showing 0.5% year over year decline.

07/29/2026

A company is about to hire 25,000 people for exactly 6 months.

H&R Block opens Tax Season 2027 applications on August 3.

This is one of the most extreme seasonal hiring patterns in the US labor market. Every July, their job postings jump from ~1,500 to 20,000+ almost overnight. Every April 15 — tax deadline — they collapse back down.

We've tracked every day of this cycle since 2022.

Here's what the data actually shows:

📉 Peak roles have dropped nearly 50% since 2022
📉 The 2025/26 season plateaued ~20,000 lower than 2022/23
📉 The off-season floor has barely moved

H&R Block launched AI-assisted filing tools in 2023. Correlation isn't causation, but when a company cuts seasonal headcount by half while rolling out AI, it's worth watching.

August 3 is the next data point.

Interesting? DM us for more insights like this.

hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag

07/28/2026

UK Q2 Job Postings Report is now live!
UK job vacancies are up 2.5% YoY. AI Specialist postings are up 95.7%. Cashier postings are down 36.4%.
Our newsletter breaks down what's actually driving Q2 2026 UK hiring. 👇

For most of this year, the story of the UK labour market has been one of gradual stabilisation. Q2 2026 shows that stabilisation is real, but it's landing very differently depending on where you look.

07/23/2026

6.45M job postings (+3.7% YoY). Median pay up 6.1%. But June payrolls missed by 58K. U.S. Q2 2026's labor market doesn't add up cleanly; we break down why, sector by sector. 👇

For most of the past year, the story of the U.S.

07/16/2026

We Sat Down with CareerXroads to Talk About Job Market Pulse

Our own Tim Dineen joined Chris Hoyt on the CXR Recruiting Community Podcast this week for a Solutions Spotlight on Job Market Pulse, our new business intelligence platform built for TA leaders and practitioners.

A few things Tim covered in the walkthrough:
❗ Job Market Pulse pairs demand data (jobs scraped daily from 300,000+ direct company career sites) with a proprietary supply-side dataset of roughly 100 million active US job seekers. No LinkedIn scraping, no survey estimates, no duplicates.
❗ Salary benchmarking is built on real posted ranges from active employers, broken out by 25th, median, 75th, and 90th percentiles, so TA teams can see whether they're actually paying market rate instead of guessing.
❗ Built-in pay transparency compliance alerts that flag roles that may be out of step with local salary disclosure laws.
❗ A ghost job and evergreen req filter. By excluding job board and staffing company data and tracking job age, the platform sidesteps a lot of the noise that shows up elsewhere.
❗ An early look at an AI risk and opportunity score, incorporating data from Anthropic, that signals how exposed a given role is to AI displacement, is useful for workforce planning, not just active recruiting.

As Tim put it: "We're not scraping LinkedIn or job boards, which can introduce spam, duplicates, and noise. We've got years of clean data from scraping directly from company career sites."

We're also opening up a product council for TA teams who want early access and a say in how this platform develops. Free access for the year if you're interested, whether or not you're already using a competitor.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/live/wEsVfVnHMmU

In this Solutions Spotlight, Chris Hoyt sits down with Tim Dineen o...

07/14/2026

IBM Says It's Hiring. The Postings Say Otherwise.

IBM has made a lot of public commitments lately: 750 new AI and quantum computing jobs at its Chicago tech hub, plans to triple entry-level hiring in the US this year. The job posting data isn't backing that up.

❗ Postings are down 46% over the past 90 days, the steepest decline among the companies we're tracking this week.
❗ No sign of a turnaround yet, the 15-to-30-day window is also down nearly 16%.
❗ Meanwhile, $2 billion in US government funding for quantum computing gave the stock a boost in May.

The stock is reacting to the announcements. The hiring data isn't. Worth watching which one turns out to be right.

Follow Aspen Tech Labs for the hiring signals behind the headlines.

07/09/2026

Hiring Is Up 35%. The Stock Hasn't Noticed Yet.

Kestra Medical Technologies is quietly one of the more interesting hiring stories in this week's earnings lineup, and the market doesn't seem to have caught on.

- Job postings are up nearly 35% over the past 90 days, one of the sharpest hiring accelerations we're tracking this week.
The stock is essentially flat year-to-date, up just over 1%, despite an 82% gain over the past year.
- The company reports fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 results on July 14.
- It was also named a 2026 USA TODAY Top Workplaces award winner in April and recently struck a strategic collaboration with Biobeat Technologies.
- Hiring accelerations like this often show up before the market prices them in. A company doesn't usually staff up this fast without expecting to need the headcount.

Worth watching what the July 14 earnings call says, and whether the stock starts catching up to what the hiring data has been signaling for months.

Follow Aspen Tech Labs for hiring signals ahead of earnings season.

07/07/2026

Everyone Expected a World Cup Hiring Boost. The Jobs Report Says No.

Goldman Sachs figured the World Cup would add about 40,000 jobs in June. Instead, leisure and hospitality lost 61,000, the sector's worst month of the year. Accommodation was down roughly 22,000, food services and drinking places down about 33,000. BLS called it "weaker than usual seasonal hiring," which is a strange thing to see while stadiums are full for group-stage matches.

Our JobMarketPulse data tells a messier, more interesting story underneath that.
Postings across all 11 US host cities are up 2.9% year over year as of June, and 8 of the 11 metros are showing gains.

- Dallas leads at 8.2%, then Houston at 7.0%, then Atlanta at 6.1%.
- Seattle and LA are the exceptions, down 2.8% and 2.0%.
- Security Officer postings across the host cities are up 6.3% YoY, over 16,000 openings total. That's a category tied straight to stadium and event operations, and it mostly sits outside the "leisure and hospitality" bucket BLS uses, so this demand can grow without ever showing up in the number that made headlines.
- Miami is the outlier worth watching. Host role postings are up 36.3% YoY, way ahead of the 5 to 13% range everywhere else. Miami's carrying some of the tournament's earliest matches, and that kind of spike is exactly what a national average is built to hide.

The real lesson here isn't that the World Cup didn't create jobs. It's that a mega-event's hiring doesn't land in the month you'd guess, or the category you'd guess. Security, event ops, hosting: these are places where demand is clearly moving, and none of it maps neatly onto how BLS counts leisure and hospitality.

Follow Aspen Tech Labs for what real-time hiring data catches.

07/02/2026

Earlier this week, we shared where EU member states stand on implementation. Only 4 of 27 made the deadline.

We went deeper into what happens next, in a piece we wrote for the Job Board Doctor.

What the US experience actually tells us about the compliance curve, why disclosing salary before an interview is very different from disclosing it in the posting, and what we expect the data to show across EU markets over the next 12-18 months.

Germany at 7.2% disclosure. Spain at 4.1%. The gap between where these markets are and where the directive needs them to be is wide, and we'll be tracking it in real time.

Full piece here 👇
https://www.jobboarddoctor.com/2026/06/26/pay-transparency/

Nearly half of job seekers won't apply to a role without a salary range listed, and 90% say pay transparency directly affects how they feel valued as candidates.