US sales and RevOps job postings fell 6.8% over the last 30 days while total US job postings rose 5.0%, so if your team still treats “this company is hiring” as one undifferentiated buying signal, you are reading the wrong number. The pullback is real, but it sits almost entirely above the individual-contributor line: director postings fell 15.2% and head-of-function postings fell 27.1%, while junior and entry-level sales postings grew 5.9%. Companies are still adding reps; they are pausing on adding bosses. These sales hiring statistics cover every US-located job opening PredictLeads classified into a sales or revenue-operations role family between August 7 and September 5, 2026, measured against the prior 30 days, and they name the role families, industries, metros, and individual companies that are the exception.
TLDR:
- Sales hiring is cooling faster than the job market at large. Sales and RevOps postings fell 6.8% (62,598 to 58,319) while total US job postings rose 5.0% (2,118,319 to 2,223,533). Sales and RevOps compressed from 2.96% to 2.62% of all US hiring.
- The cut is coming from the top. Head-of-function postings fell 27.1%, director postings fell 15.2%, and VP postings fell 10.2%, while junior and entry-level sales postings grew 5.9% and C-level postings ticked up 5.7% off a base of 53.
- Efficiency functions are holding up better than expansion functions. Sales enablement (+3.3%) and account management (+1.5%) grew, while partnerships and channel (-16.2%), customer success (-13.5%), and account executive or field sales (-8.3%) all fell faster than the -6.8% sales and RevOps aggregate.
- Hiring is broad, not concentrated. The 10 busiest employers account for just 6.7% of current postings, the median hiring company posted exactly one open role, and 8,169 companies posted a sales or RevOps role after posting none the month before.
- This report is built on PredictLeads Job Openings data: 279.2M+ historical postings since 2018 across 2.9M+ websites, 10.2M active openings at any time, each timestamped with
first_seen_atandlast_seen_atand classified against O*NET occupation codes and 11 seniority levels.
What these sales hiring statistics measure, and what they do not
This report counts newly observed job postings, meaning postings first seen inside each 30-day window. It is not a count of the standing inventory of open roles, and it is not a count of hires. A posting is an allocation decision a company already made, nothing more. Removal and closure timestamps (removed_at, closed_with) were inspected but were not exercised enough in this pass to certify them for a clean active-inventory count across both windows, so they are not used. One consequence is worth stating plainly: a company with many long-open, infrequently refreshed roles under-counts here relative to a company that reposts often.
Scope is US-located job openings, defined by the job’s own resolved location and falling back to the employer’s headquarters only when the posting itself carries no location. Employer headquarters can sit anywhere, so a New Zealand company hiring in Austin is in scope. No claim is made about hiring outside the United States, even for companies headquartered abroad.
The window is anchored to the data, not to the calendar. Newly observed postings are complete through September 5, 2026; the days immediately before this report ran showed no observations, consistent with a weekly refresh cycle, so the trailing 30 days end there rather than at today’s date. A 90-day comparison was tested first and discarded: total US posting volume in this data set showed a sharp, one-time step-change in late March 2026, visible across every job category rather than sales roles specifically, which would have distorted any window straddling it. Both 30-day windows fall entirely after that shift. If you want the mechanics of turning posting counts into a defensible trend, our guide to reading hiring velocity as a company growth signal covers the method.
The snapshot: US sales and RevOps hiring, trailing 30 days
Sales and RevOps hiring shrank on every measure except openings per company, which held flat. The table below is the reproducible core of this report.
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
| Metric | Prior 30d | Current 30d | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales & RevOps job openings | 62,598 | 58,319 | -6.8% |
| Distinct hiring companies | 15,726 | 14,702 | -6.5% |
| Median openings per hiring company | 1 | 1 | no change |
| Mean openings per hiring company | 3.98 | 3.97 | -0.3% |
| Share of all US job openings | 2.96% | 2.62% | -0.34pp |
| All US job openings (any category) | 2,118,319 | 2,223,533 | +5.0% |
Why the share-of-market number is the one to read. Raw posting counts in this data set are sensitive to how much of the web got crawled in a given week, which is a data-collection fact rather than a hiring fact. Comparing sales and RevOps postings against all US postings in the same window cancels most of that noise, and it still shows sales hiring under-performing the broader market, so the finding is not an artifact of the comparison method. One caveat on the denominator: the all-category US baseline is not run through the same company-level job-board cleaning as the sales-specific figures, so treat the 2.62% level as directional and the direction of travel as the signal.
The median hiring company posted exactly one open role, and the 10 busiest employers account for just 6.7% of current postings. This is not a handful of large employers moving the market. It is thousands of companies making small, individually unremarkable moves, which is exactly what makes the aggregate pattern worth watching and the account-level detail worth more than the headline.
Role mix: which revenue functions are growing and which are not
Every matching job was assigned to exactly one of eight role families by title and description text. Ordered here from most to least resilient, the split is clean: the two families that grew are both about getting more out of the team and customer base a company already has.
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
Small base (read as directional, not a precise rate): Sales enablement.
| Role family | Prior 30d postings | Current 30d postings | Change | Prior companies | Current companies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales enablement | 213 | 220 | +3.3% | 164 | 177 |
| Account management | 8,998 | 9,133 | +1.5% | 3,494 | 3,450 |
| Solutions / sales engineering | 2,223 | 2,133 | -4.0% | 1,238 | 1,089 |
| Sales / revenue operations | 714 | 676 | -5.3% | 554 | 531 |
| SDR / BDR & lead generation | 2,199 | 2,081 | -5.4% | 1,429 | 1,287 |
| Account executive / field sales | 45,266 | 41,525 | -8.3% | 11,516 | 10,711 |
| Customer success (adjacent) | 1,826 | 1,580 | -13.5% | 1,212 | 1,008 |
| Partnerships & channel | 1,159 | 971 | -16.2% | 678 | 628 |
Three families fell but beat the -6.8% aggregate: solutions and sales engineering (-4.0%), sales and revenue operations (-5.3%), and SDR/BDR (-5.4%). Three fell faster than it: account executive and field sales (-8.3%), customer success (-13.5%), and partnerships and channel (-16.2%). The four fastest declines, taken together, are the functions that open new pipeline or new relationships. Taken with growth in enablement and account management, this reads less like “sales hiring is slowing” and more like a shift from expansion hiring to efficiency hiring: investment in making existing reps and existing accounts produce more, rather than adding new logo-hunting headcount.
The exact titles driving the moves support that reading. Sales Operations Specialist postings fell 78% while Director of Revenue Operations postings grew 47%, which is consistent with RevOps headcount consolidating into fewer, more senior roles rather than being built out at the analyst level. Partnerships Manager and Director of Customer Success both fell sharply, so the retreat in expansion-adjacent functions is not one outlier title, it is the whole family.
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
| Job title | Prior 30d | Current 30d | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Director of Revenue Operations | 36 | 53 | +47% |
| Partnerships Manager | 158 | 111 | -30% |
| Director of Customer Success | 84 | 36 | -57% |
| Sales Operations Specialist | 247 | 54 | -78% |
Because PredictLeads assigns O*NET occupation codes and a normalized_title to every posting, a family-level shift like this is queryable rather than a manual tagging exercise, which is the same mechanism behind finding companies hiring for a specific role by O*NET code.
Seniority mix: companies are hiring reps, not bosses
PredictLeads assigns a seniority tier to every job opening independent of its title text, and across all eight role families combined the current month’s cuts are concentrated almost entirely above the individual-contributor line.
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
Small base (read as directional, not a precise rate): C-level (CRO, etc.), Head of function.
| Seniority tier | Prior 30d | Current 30d | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior / entry-level | 4,598 | 4,871 | +5.9% |
| C-level (CRO and similar), small base | 53 | 56 | +5.7% |
| Manager | 10,602 | 9,942 | -6.2% |
| Mid-level individual contributor | 41,941 | 38,879 | -7.3% |
| Vice President | 774 | 695 | -10.2% |
| Director | 4,255 | 3,610 | -15.2% |
| Head of function, small base | 336 | 245 | -27.1% |
Nothing in this data says leadership teams are shrinking. A director or VP hire is a single, lumpy event next to a steady stream of rep postings, so a slower month for leadership hiring produces a much larger percentage swing on a much smaller base. What it does say is more useful than a headcount claim: right now is a better moment to reach a VP of Sales with a message about doing more with their current team than with a message about adding headcount, because the mix shows where the budget is actually going. That is the difference between using a hiring feed as an alert and using it to prioritize accounts by hiring signals.
Where it is happening: industry, company size, and geography
Company attributes come from PredictLeads firmographic data on the hiring employer, joined against the job-opening record. Industry is missing for 16.7% of hiring companies and company size for 16.3%; both are reported as “(unknown)” rather than imputed or dropped, because a 2,462-company unknown bucket is too large to hide.
Top industries by companies hiring
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
| Industry | Companies | Roles posted |
|---|---|---|
| Software Development | 1,309 | 4,001 |
| IT Services & Consulting | 498 | 1,704 |
| Construction | 473 | 2,314 |
| Financial Services | 450 | 1,377 |
| Hospitals & Health Care | 420 | 1,761 |
| Insurance | 342 | 2,302 |
| Advertising Services | 309 | 1,336 |
| Retail | 279 | 2,405 |
| Hospitality | 257 | 1,043 |
| Wholesale Building Materials | 183 | 1,036 |
| (unknown industry) | 2,462 | 9,048 |
Software is the largest single industry building revenue teams, with 1,309 companies posting 4,001 sales and RevOps roles, more named companies than any other industry. That matters to anyone selling GTM software: the most common type of company hiring for revenue capacity right now is also, disproportionately, the buyer of sales-intelligence, CRM, engagement, and enablement tooling. The market this report describes is substantially the market for GTM software itself. For how the same dataset ranks sector momentum across all role types rather than sales roles alone, see our hiring momentum tracker of industries accelerating hiring.
By company size
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
| Size band (LinkedIn employee band) | Companies | Roles posted |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (solo) | 45 | 152 |
| 2-10 | 792 | 2,714 |
| 11-50 | 1,710 | 4,523 |
| 51-200 | 2,984 | 7,443 |
| 201-500 | 1,884 | 4,924 |
| 501-1,000 | 1,311 | 4,393 |
| 1,001-5,000 | 2,059 | 9,539 |
| 5,001-10,000 | 572 | 4,420 |
| 10,001+ | 954 | 11,425 |
| (unknown) | 2,391 | 8,786 |
The two ends of the size range behave differently, and the difference is the useful part. The 51-200 band contains the most hiring companies of any band at 2,984, but posts 7,443 roles. The 10,001+ band contains 954 hiring companies and posts 11,425 roles, more than any other band. Breadth of accounts sits in the mid-market; depth of postings per account sits in the enterprise. Which one you want depends on whether you are building a target list or sizing a single account.
Top metros by breadth of hiring companies
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
| Metro (employer HQ) | Companies | Roles posted |
|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | 786 | 3,336 |
| San Francisco, CA | 395 | 1,255 |
| Chicago, IL | 211 | 859 |
| Houston, TX | 188 | 633 |
| Austin, TX | 187 | 459 |
| Atlanta, GA | 160 | 1,030 |
| Dallas, TX | 142 | 821 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 133 | 553 |
| Boston, MA | 120 | 598 |
| Charlotte, NC | 87 | 501 |
Ranking metros by company breadth rather than posting volume is a deliberate choice, and it changes the answer. Every posting carries structured location_data with city, state, country, and continent, so the same table can be rebuilt by job location instead of employer headquarters. Our ranking of the top 20 US tech hiring hubs applies the same breadth-over-volume logic to technology hiring.
What the aggregate hides: the first-hire signal
The most useful fact in this data is not the aggregate trend, it is the account-level churn underneath it. Companies enter and exit this pool constantly, and the pool is not a steady state.
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
Across the two windows combined, 23,895 distinct companies posted at least one sales or RevOps role. Of those, 8,169 (34%) posted for the first time in the current 30 days after posting none in the prior period, and a slightly larger share, 9,193 (38%), went quiet after hiring for these roles last month. The remaining 6,533 companies hired in both windows. That means roughly one in three of this month’s 14,702 hiring companies is new to the pool. Entry and exit, not a stable pool, is most of what is happening beneath the headline number, and a company crossing a threshold for the first time is a far more specific signal than a company adding its fifth account executive.
Source: PredictLeads proprietary job-opening data, Aug 7–Sep 5, 2026 vs. Jul 8–Aug 6, 2026.
| Function added for the first time this month | Companies |
|---|---|
| Revenue / sales operations | 211 |
| Solutions / sales engineering | 168 |
| Partnerships / channel | 94 |
| Sales enablement | 58 |
These are the accounts worth a second look before the market catches up to them: a 200 to 500-person company posting its first Director of Revenue Operations role, or a software company that has never listed a Solutions Engineer suddenly listing three. Neither shows up in a funding announcement or a headcount press release. They show up here first, which is why a sustained change in what a company hires for functions as a sales trigger event for outbound timing in a way that a single job post never does.
Eighteen companies building revenue teams right now
These 18 companies were selected for a specific, checkable pattern in the data, not for being large: a new function, a broad-based jump across several sales roles at once, or accelerating hiring while overall headcount growth stayed modest. Every figure is a job-opening count, current versus prior 30-day window. Each entry is a pattern match in posting data, not a confirmed org-chart event.
| Company | Industry / Size / HQ | Pattern | Prior to current | Why it is interesting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xometry xometry.com | Software Development (manufacturing marketplace), 1,001-5,000, North Bethesda, MD | First RevOps hire, first Solutions Engineer | 7 to 17 total; RevOps 0 to 4; Sol. Eng. 0 to 9 | Standing up revenue operations and technical pre-sales in the same month without a broader hiring surge: a company formalizing its GTM motion rather than simply scaling it. |
| IQVIA iqvia.com | Hospitals & Health Care (life-sciences data and CRO), 10,001+, Durham, NC | Five-fold acceleration across three functions at once | 24 to 128 total | A five-fold jump across account management, field sales, and RevOps simultaneously, broad enough that it is unlikely to be one team’s local hiring plan. |
| Halter halterhq.com | Technology / Internet (agtech), 51-200, Auckland, NZ, hiring in the US | More than 20-fold acceleration, US market entry | 3 to 68 total | An international scale-up building a commercial team in the US from close to zero: the shape of a company opening a new territory. |
| Verizon Connect verizonconnect.com | Fleet and telematics software, Arlington, VA | New GTM build-out from zero | 0 to 107 total | A full commercial team appearing from a standing start in one month, flagged with the caveat that it may reflect an internal reporting or brand change at parent Verizon rather than pure net-new growth. |
| Selectquote selectquote.com | Insurance (direct-to-consumer, tech-enabled), 1,001-5,000, Overland Park, KS | Full-funnel build from zero | 0 to 83 total | Top-of-funnel and closing roles opening together, from zero: a full pipeline being built rather than backfilled. |
| Comcast Technology Solutions comcasttechnologysolutions.com | Broadcast and media technology, 1,001-5,000, Centennial, CO | Five functions active at once | 24 to 51 total | The broadest functional spread on this list, with five distinct revenue functions active in one month. |
| TransPerfect transperfect.com | Translation and localization, 5,001-10,000, New York, NY | Eight-fold acceleration | 7 to 57 total | Established company, sharp jump in new-business capacity across account management, AE, and SDR/BDR. |
| RRD rrd.com | Advertising and marketing services, 10,001+, Chicago, IL | More than doubled | 36 to 81 total | A large, established firm more than doubling its sales hiring in one month. |
| Comcast Advertising comcastadvertising.com | Advertising Services, 5,001-10,000, New York, NY | First RevOps hire | 76 to 142 total; RevOps 0 to 5 | A large, already-growing sales org adding formal revenue operations for the first time. |
| LexisNexis lexisnexis.com | IT Services & Consulting (legal and data), 10,001+, New York, NY | First enablement hire | 201 to 263 total; Enablement 0 to 5 | Adds a formal sales-enablement function for the first time inside an already-large, growing sales organization. |
| Soroco soroco.com | Software Development (process intelligence), 201-500, Boston, MA | First Solutions Engineer | Sol. Eng. 0 to 11 | Building technical pre-sales capacity from scratch, typically a sign the sales motion is moving upmarket into more complex, technically evaluated deals. |
| Alexion Pharmaceuticals alexion.com | Biotechnology Research, 1,001-5,000, Boston, MA | First RevOps hire and first partnerships hire | RevOps 0 to 4; Partnerships 0 to 4 | Two commercial-infrastructure functions appearing for the first time in the same month, inside a stable overall headcount: investment in process, not headcount growth. |
| InterWorks interworks.com | IT Services & Consulting, 201-500, Stillwater, OK | First RevOps hire | RevOps 0 to 3 | A sub-500-person consultancy crossing into a dedicated revenue-operations function for the first time, the smallest company on this list to do so. |
| PrismHR prismhr.com | Software Development (HR and payroll platform), 201-500, Maricopa, AZ | First enablement hire | Enablement 0 to 3 | A modest but genuine first: a mid-market HR-tech vendor formalizing sales enablement. |
| Core-Mark International core-mark.com | Wholesale distribution, 501-1,000, Calgary, Canada, hiring in the US | First enablement hire while overall hiring cooled | 210 to 184 total; Enablement 0 to 2 | Overall sales hiring pulled back, but enablement appeared for the first time anyway: protect productivity while headcount cools, not a growth story. |
| Revenue Nomad revenuenomad.com | Internet Marketplace Platforms, 2-10, New York, NY | Channel-first from day one | 0 to 26 total; Partnerships 0 to 11 | A 2 to 10-person company where 11 of its first 26 open sales roles are partnerships or channel: an unusually channel-led go-to-market for a company this size. |
| Peer Consulting Resources peer-consulting.com | Software Development, 11-50, Princeton, NJ | First partnerships hire | Partnerships 0 to 9 | Nine of this small consultancy’s newly posted roles are partnerships-focused: a deliberate, visible channel bet. |
| Hilti (multi-market) hilti.com plus six country sites | Construction and industrial tools manufacturer, 10,001+ globally | Coordinated multi-country push | 0 to 40-56 postings per entity (US, DE, BE, PT, BR, PL, CZ) | Seven separate Hilti country domains show the identical new pattern in the same month, visible here specifically because each national entity posts under its own domain. A reminder that “one company” in the data can mean one coordinated global commercial push. |
The Hilti row is the clearest illustration of why entity resolution matters when you read hiring data at scale: seven domains, one commercial decision. When an acceleration like this shows up at a competitor or a partner rather than a prospect, the same pattern reads differently, which is the subject of our guide to interpreting competitor hiring spikes.
What these findings mean for sales and GTM teams
A job opening is not proof of an outcome. It is an allocation decision a company already made. Reading the mix rather than the count is what turns that into something a GTM team can act on.
| What the data shows | What it may indicate | What to do differently |
|---|---|---|
| First-ever RevOps or sales-operations posting | The company is formalizing process as it scales, and may be evaluating a CRM, forecasting, or data-hygiene tool for the first time | Lead with process and reporting pain, not “more pipeline.” That is not the buying trigger here. |
| First-ever solutions or sales-engineering posting | Deals are getting more technical or moving upmarket | Sales-engineering tooling, demo automation, and technical content are timelier than generic prospecting tools. |
| Surge across three or more functions at once | A funded or budgeted GTM build-out rather than routine backfill | Highest-priority account for a broad platform pitch: multiple buying committees are being staffed simultaneously. |
| AE and SDR growth with flat leadership hiring | Scaling the machine that already exists rather than redesigning it | Sell efficiency and ramp-time tools to current managers, not org-design or leadership-search adjacent offers. |
| Enablement or account-management growth while AE and SDR hiring cools | Budget shifting from acquisition to expansion and productivity | Retention, upsell, and rep-productivity messaging outperforms new-logo-generation pitches right now. |
Five audiences get direct use out of the mix rather than the count. Account-based sales and SDR teams can route “first RevOps hire” and “broad-based surge” accounts to different plays instead of one generic outbound sequence, the approach we walk through in our guide to using job-openings data for sales prospecting. RevOps and sales-intelligence platforms get a live proxy for total addressable market movement inside their own vertical, and software’s 1,309-company hiring base is a standing target list refreshed weekly. Marketing and demand-gen teams can time outbound and paid spend to when a company’s role mix shifts, rather than firing on a generic “grew headcount” trigger that fires for warehouse staff as readily as for account executives. Compensation and territory planners get an external benchmark for how peers are splitting junior versus senior and new-logo versus expansion investment this quarter. Investors and market-intelligence teams get an allocation signal that appears in the data before it appears in an earnings call or a press release.
A caution, stated plainly. None of this is proof of intent to buy, a funding event, or a business outcome. A job posting is what it is: a company deciding, on a given day, that a role is worth advertising. Treat every pattern here as a reason to look closer, not a reason to skip the qualifying call.
Methodology and limitations
The full method matters more than usual in a report like this, because most of the analytical work was removing things that would have produced a wrong answer.
Role taxonomy. Eight mutually exclusive families (SDR/BDR and lead generation, account executive and field sales, sales and revenue operations, sales enablement, solutions and sales engineering, partnerships and channel, account management, and customer success reported as adjacent rather than core sales), assigned by a title-text rule set validated against the 80 most common matching titles in the data, covering roughly half of all matched postings, plus a manual review of the long tail.
Seniority is not derived from title text. It uses PredictLeads’ own seniority classification on the job-opening record directly (not_set, founder, c_level, partner, president, vice_president, head, director, manager, mid_senior, junior), independent of the role-family rules above.
Company-level cleaning for job boards, aggregators, and misattribution. A company was excluded if any of four conditions held: PredictLeads’ own approved job_board category classification; its machine-learning-predicted job_board, forum, or classifieds classification; a domain or company-name match against a job-board or staffing-name pattern; or the company posted across six or more of the eight role families simultaneously while its LinkedIn employee-size band was unknown or 200 or fewer, a pattern no genuine single employer produces in a 30-day window but real aggregator domains produce routinely. 615 of 24,510 candidate companies (2.4%) were excluded this way. The single largest “company” in the raw, uncleaned data, at 1,753 postings, was one such domain.
| Step (current 30-day window) | Postings | Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Raw taxonomy-matched, US-located, approved postings, after title-level false-positive exclusions | 72,312 | 15,140 |
| After job-board and aggregator company exclusion | 58,319 | 14,702 |
Known limitations, in full:
- Newly observed postings, not standing active inventory. A company with many long-open, infrequently refreshed roles under-counts here relative to one that reposts often.
removed_atandclosed_withwere inspected but not used to build an active-inventory figure; closure and removal timestamps were not exercised enough in this pass to certify them for that purpose.- Industry (16.7%) and company size (16.3%) are missing for a meaningful minority of hiring companies, and are reported as “(unknown)” rather than imputed.
- The all-category US job-openings baseline used for the market-share metric is not run through the same company-level job-board cleaning as the sales-specific figures. Treat it as a directional denominator only.
- Exclusion rules are conservative. Residual aggregator and misattributed volume likely remains, concentrated below the top 25 companies by volume.
- Seniority is assigned per posting by PredictLeads’ own classification, independent of this report’s title-based role-family rules, and is not itself validated here beyond spot-checks.
- Broad-based acceleration and first-hire watchlist entries are pattern matches, not confirmed org-chart events. Each is a real, checkable data point, not a verified fact about a company’s internal structure or strategy.
- US-only. No claim is made about hiring patterns outside the United States, even for companies headquartered abroad: their US-located postings are in scope, their home-market postings are not.
- A 90-day comparison was tested and discarded because of a one-time, all-category step-change in total US posting volume in late March 2026. Both 30-day windows fall entirely after it.
For the official US government series on job openings, which uses an establishment survey rather than observed postings and answers a different question, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Role classification here is anchored to the O*NET occupational taxonomy. If posting data is new to your team as an input, our explainer on job postings as alternative data covers what the signal does and does not support.
How PredictLeads Job Openings data powers a report like this
Every number above comes from one dataset queried at scale, and that is the point. PredictLeads Job Openings holds 279.2M+ historical job postings since 2018 across 2.9M+ websites, with 10.2M active openings at any time and 710,600+ companies currently hiring. Each record carries first_seen_at, last_seen_at, structured location_data, salary_data, seniority, normalized_title, and onet_data with occupation codes and families across 26 job categories and 11 seniority levels. Because every dataset is point-in-time and timestamped, the trailing-window comparisons, first-hire thresholds, and velocity calculations in this report are queries rather than a manual scraping project. You can review the dataset on the Job Openings page and the field-level schema in the PredictLeads documentation.
Hiring is strongest when you read it next to other company signals, because a posting tells you an allocation decision was made and not why. PredictLeads sits on 130.7M+ company records across 195 countries and pairs Job Openings with News Events (10M+ signals since 2016 across 37 categories), Financing Events (210,800+ events since 2016, from pre_angel through series_j), Technology Detections (1.5B+ detections since 2018 across 50,000+ technologies, which provide evidence of which technologies a company uses or has recently used), Connections (371.8M+ since 2019), and Similar Companies (18.9M+ companies with up to 50 lookalikes each and a text reason for the top 20). A first-ever RevOps posting means something different at a company that just closed a Series B than at one that did not, which is why teams combine hiring, news, funding, and technology signals in one workflow, and why the fastest way to widen a pattern like the 211 first-time RevOps companies is to find companies similar to your best customers.
PredictLeads is a data provider, not a platform: it delivers all of the above by API, flat files, webhooks, and MCP, operates on public sources only, and is SOC 2 Type II compliant alongside GDPR and CCPA. If you are still comparing options, our breakdown of job posting and hiring intent data providers lays out the criteria that actually matter for work like this.
Final thoughts on sales and RevOps hiring in September 2026
“Sales hiring is down” is true and nearly useless. The useful version is that sales hiring is down 6.8% while the broader market is up 5.0%, the decline is concentrated in leadership rather than the front line, expansion functions are shrinking faster than efficiency functions, and roughly half of the companies hiring for these roles this month were not hiring for them last month. That last fact is the one to build on. An aggregate tells you what the market did; the account-level entries and exits underneath it tell you which specific companies to call, and what to say when you do.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is sales hiring slowing down in 2026?
Yes, and faster than the job market around it. US sales and RevOps job postings fell 6.8% in the 30 days ending September 5, 2026 (62,598 to 58,319), while total US job postings rose 5.0% over the same window, compressing sales and RevOps from 2.96% to 2.62% of all US hiring. This measures newly observed postings rather than confirmed hires or standing open-role inventory. PredictLeads Job Openings data, with 279.2M+ postings since 2018, is what makes that like-for-like window comparison possible.
Which industries are hiring the most salespeople right now?
Software Development leads by a wide margin on breadth, with 1,309 distinct companies posting 4,001 sales and RevOps roles in the current 30-day window. IT Services and Consulting follows at 498 companies, then Construction at 473, Financial Services at 450, and Hospitals and Health Care at 420. Insurance and Retail post high role volumes (2,302 and 2,405) from fewer companies, so they are concentrated rather than broad. Industry is unknown for 16.7% of hiring companies and is reported separately rather than imputed.
Are companies still hiring sales leaders, or just reps?
Mostly reps. Head-of-function postings fell 27.1%, director postings fell 15.2%, and VP postings fell 10.2%, while junior and entry-level sales postings grew 5.9%. Leadership hires are lumpy single events on small bases, so a slow month produces a large percentage swing, and nothing here says leadership teams are shrinking. The practical read is that budget is going into rep capacity and productivity rather than new layers of management, which changes what a VP of Sales wants to hear from you this quarter.
How can you tell when a company has just built its first RevOps or partnerships function?
You look for a function appearing at two or more roles in the current window after zero in the prior one. On that test, 211 companies added revenue or sales operations for the first time this month, 168 added solutions or sales engineering, 94 added partnerships or channel, and 58 added sales enablement. The two-role threshold filters out one-off postings more likely to be noise than a deliberate function launch. Because PredictLeads timestamps every posting with first_seen_at, the same threshold test can run continuously against your own account list.
Is job-posting data a reliable buying signal for sales teams?
It is a reliable allocation signal and a poor intent signal, and the distinction matters. A posting proves a company decided a role was worth advertising, not that it will buy, hire, or hit a number. It works best as a reason to look closer and as a way to choose your message: a first-ever RevOps posting points to process and reporting pain, while a surge across three functions points to a budgeted build-out. Stack it with News Events, Financing Events, and Technology Detections before you act, and keep the qualifying call.