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
Youth unemployment looks stable. Nine million more young people are neither working nor studying.The global youth unemployment rate went from 12.3% in 2023 to 12.4% in 2025 - a tenth of a point, and the ILO projects it flat through 2027. Over the same two years the number of young people not in employment, education or training rose by nine million, to 257 million. Both come from the same report. They are not in conflict: they count different people.12.4%the global youth unemployment rate in 2025, up from 12.3% in 2023 - and projected to stay between 12.3% and 12.4% through 2027257myoung people not in employment, education or training in 2025 - nine million more than in 2023, a share of 20% against 19.7%3.4the ratio of the youth unemployment rate to the adult rate in 2025, and rising: youth went from 12.3% to 12.4% while adults went from 3.7% to 3.6%Read the analysis →Earlier editions
- · 7 min readBritain lost 19,000 vacancies in a year. Firms with under ten staff lost 18,000 of them.UK vacancies fell 2.7% over the year to 707,000. At businesses with 1 to 9 employees they fell 16.1%, to 95,000 - six times the rate of the market as a whole. That band holds about an eighth of all vacancies and accounts for almost the entire annual decline. The headline is a small number sitting on top of a very uneven one.Read the analysis →
- · 7 min readChanging jobs still pays more. Two trackers cannot agree how much.For July 2026, ADP put the annual raise for people who changed jobs at 7.0% and for people who stayed at 4.4% - a gap of 2.6 points, the widest in a year. The Atlanta Fed, reading a different survey the same month, put changers at 4.4% and stayers at 3.6% - a gap of 0.8. Both are real. 4.4% is the mover's raise in one measure and the stayer's raise in the other.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readAlmost nobody is being fired. Almost nobody is being hired.In June 2026 American employers let go of 1.1% of their staff and hired 3.4%. The first number is lower than in all but 36 of the 307 months on record. The second is lower than in all but 69. Those two facts are usually told as opposite stories. They are one market.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readHalf have been looking ten weeks. A quarter, more than six months.The middle of the American unemployment queue has been searching for 10.5 weeks. The average search in that same queue has run 24.9 weeks. Both numbers describe the same 6,916,000 people in the same month, and the distance between them is not a rounding difference. It is the shape of the queue.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readThe rate fell. So did the number of people working.American unemployment has improved for three months running, from 4.3% in May to 4.1% in July. Over those same two months, 594,000 fewer people had a job and 1,213,000 more were outside the labour force altogether. Both statements come from the same survey. Neither is wrong.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readBritain counted its jobs twice and got two answers.One official measure says 75.1% of working-age people are in work. Another, published the same morning in the same bulletin, says there were 78,000 fewer employees on a payroll than a year earlier. Neither is wrong. They are answers to two different questions, and the difference between those questions decides what a job advert can actually offer you.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readFive in a hundred were stopped from changing jobs.The OECD surveyed firms and employees across fifteen countries and found that between a fifth and a third of private-sector workers are bound by a non-compete clause - a contract term that decides where they may work next. Five per cent say it actually stopped them moving jobs. This is the constraint no job-matching system can see, including ours, and it is worth naming for that reason alone.Read the analysis →
- · 8 min readA 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.Read the analysis →
- · 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.