Ten industries are accelerating hiring faster than any of the other 190 we scored this month, and not one of them is tech. PredictLeads analyzed proprietary company and job-opening data across 1,305,998 companies between July 29 and August 27, 2026, scored 200 industries on how fast each was hiring against its own recent pace, then checked the specific companies behind every candidate before publishing a ranking. If your territory plan is built on sector-level labor data, it is pointed at the wrong list: the broad sector containing software, IT services, consulting, and engineering contracted 3.2% month over month in the same window. This report covers the full Top 10, what is actually driving each industry, three signals inside hiring data that a headcount number cannot show you, and how to convert any of it into an account list.
TLDR:
- Tour Operators (score 94.3), Exam Preparation and Tutoring (93.1), and Golf Courses and Country Clubs (88.0) lead the ranking. Median month-over-month job-opening growth across the Top 10 is 12.2%.
- This is an acceleration ranking, not a size ranking. It measures how fast an industry is hiring against its own recent pace, so a large, slow-moving sector cannot win it by default.
- Four unrelated corners of retail, auto parts, jewelry, sporting goods, and used vehicles, are accelerating at once, consistent with a pre-holiday staffing build starting earlier than usual.
- Financing correlates with deceleration, not acceleration. Hiring companies that are slowing down raised in the past 12 months at 2.999%, versus 1.688% for those speeding up.
- An average of 25.6% of the companies hiring in these ten industries posted nothing at all in the prior five months. This analysis runs on PredictLeads Job Openings data: 279.2M+ postings since 2018 across 2.9M+ websites, each timestamped with
first_seen_at.
What hiring momentum is, and what this ranking is not
Hiring momentum measures how fast a company or an industry is hiring relative to its own recent pace, not how many jobs it posts in total. That distinction is the whole point. A raw-volume ranking of hiring industries is won by whoever employs the most people, and it returns roughly the same answer every month: hospitals, staffing firms, restaurants, large retailers. It tells you where the labor market is big. It does not tell you where anything just changed.
A momentum ranking answers the question a GTM team actually has, which is not “who is large” but “who is different this month than last month.” Those are the accounts where budget is moving, where a function is being stood up, and where an incumbent vendor may not yet exist.
| Raw volume ranking | Hiring Momentum ranking | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | Who posts the most jobs? | Who is hiring faster than they were? |
| Typical winners | The largest employers, month after month | Industries whose own pace just shifted |
| What moves it | Company size | Rate of change, breadth, and new entrants |
| GTM use | Territory sizing | Timing and account prioritization |
| Example from this run | General medical and surgical hospitals: 191,117 openings in 30 days | Tour Operators: 2,659 openings, score 94.3 |
Tour Operators posted about 1.4% of the hospital sector’s opening volume this month and still took the top spot, because the score rewards change and breadth rather than headcount. If you want the mechanics behind reading hiring rate rather than hiring size, our guide to job-openings data as a company growth signal covers the method in detail. Every posting counted here carries first_seen_at, last_seen_at, and a company reference, which is what makes a per-industry pace calculation possible at all.
Fastest-Hiring Industries: Top 10, Sep 2026
| # | Industry | Score | Openings (30d) | MoM | Vs. 90-day pace | Companies hiring | New to hiring |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tour Operators | 94.3 | 2,659 | +12.1% | +19.7% | 747 | 30.9% |
| 2 | Exam Preparation and Tutoring | 93.1 | 4,326 | +16.0% | +17.4% | 571 | 30.8% |
| 3 | Golf Courses and Country Clubs | 88.0 | 2,476 | +15.4% | +16.8% | 673 | 19.3% |
| 4 | Automotive Parts and Accessories Retailers | 85.7 | 4,125 | +12.4% | +8.3% | 321 | 23.1% |
| 5 | Language Schools | 85.0 | 1,975 | +4.3% | +12.2% | 566 | 33.0% |
| 6 | Jewelry Retailers | 84.8 | 3,724 | +7.4% | +11.9% | 547 | 24.7% |
| 7 | Janitorial Services | 81.7 | 7,378 | +9.4% | +10.2% | 911 | 26.7% |
| 8 | Sporting Goods Retailers | 79.7 | 6,897 | +4.0% | +8.9% | 560 | 24.1% |
| 9 | Sporting and Athletic Goods Manufacturing | 78.1 | 2,134 | +20.8% | +18.8% | 452 | 19.9% |
| 10 | Used Car Dealers | 77.6 | 3,296 | +15.1% | +33.1% | 359 | 23.7% |
The pattern that jumps out first is retail. Automotive parts, jewelry, sporting goods, and used vehicles are four unrelated retail categories accelerating in the same 30 days. That is not one chain expanding, and it is consistent with a market-wide pre-holiday staffing build starting earlier than the calendar would suggest. It also sits against a cautious backdrop: in its most recent published seasonal forecast, the National Retail Federation projected 265,000 to 365,000 seasonal hires against 442,000 the year before, and its chief economist noted that some hiring may be pulled forward to support October buying events. Earlier and smaller is a coherent story, and our data shows the “earlier” half of it in August.
How the Hiring Momentum Score works
The Momentum Score blends five signals into a single 0 to 100 figure, weighted toward the shortest and most current horizons. Each of the five is percentile-ranked across all 200 eligible industries before blending, which is what lets a 1,975-opening industry and a 7,378-opening industry compete on the shape of their trend rather than on their size.
Three controls keep a single large employer from writing an industry’s story. Each company’s monthly opening count is capped at the 97th percentile of its own industry before the industry total is summed. An industry is only scored if, after that cap, no single company accounts for more than 25% of its current volume and no three companies account for more than 45%. And an industry must clear a minimum sample of 300 companies hiring and 1,500 openings in the current window before it is eligible at all. Of 1,009 industry categories, 264 cleared the sample bar, and 132 catch-all categories were removed outright, leaving 200 scored.
The ranking largely survives being checked a different way. Seven of the Top 10 also land in the top 20 of a plain month-over-month ranking, and eight of ten land in the top 20 of a pure 90-day acceleration ranking. Only one of ten holds up on the longest horizon, the latest 90 days against the previous 90, and the clearest reason is Golf Courses and Country Clubs, which reads as cooling 17.2% on that lens because it is past its summer peak. Both readings are true. They measure different horizons, which is why the score deliberately weights the shorter, more current signals and reports the longer view separately rather than blending it in.
One framing point matters before you act on any of this. Job openings measure demand for labor, not completed hires. The Bureau of Labor Statistics draws the same distinction in its JOLTS data definitions, where openings are a point-in-time stock measure and hires are a flow measure over the month. Treat every number here as evidence of hiring intent and organizational attention, not as a headcount figure. PredictLeads Job Openings records make that reading possible because each posting carries first_seen_at, last_seen_at, and a status field, so a pace calculation is a query rather than an estimate.
Sector averages hide the real story
If you had run this analysis at the sector level, you would have missed eight of the ten industries in the ranking. Educational Services posted the second-lowest Momentum Score of the 20 broad sectors measured, at 22.5 with openings down 1.4% month over month. Two specific sub-industries inside it, Exam Preparation and Tutoring and Language Schools, rank second and fifth in the Top 10. Averaging across a sector cancels its own internal divergence.
The other headline in that chart is what is not accelerating. Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services, the sector that contains software companies, IT services firms, consultancies, and engineering practices, posted the second-sharpest month-over-month decline of the 20 sectors at 3.2%, behind only the catch-all Other Services category. That does not mean tech hiring has stopped. It means the sector is not where the change is right now, and a prospecting motion built on the assumption that it is will be pointed at the flattest part of the market. PredictLeads Companies records carry structured industry classification for 130.7M+ companies across 195 countries, which is what makes the sector-versus-sub-industry comparison a single query rather than a manual grouping exercise.
What drives each of the Top 10?
Total openings tell you an industry moved. The function mix tells you why, and it is the more useful of the two for a GTM team, because a services business that suddenly starts posting quality-assurance or engineering roles is usually investing in the platform behind the business, which tends to arrive with new software budget.
| Industry | Fastest-growing function vs. 90-day pace | Notable decline | Where it is concentrated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tour Operators | Food +154% | None in the tracked mix | UK, Istanbul, Leeds, Idaho, Netherlands, New Delhi |
| Exam Preparation and Tutoring | Quality Assurance +495% | Education -13% | US, India, Dubai, UK, Lucknow, Tokyo |
| Golf Courses and Country Clubs | Engineering +134%, Protective Services +86% | Manual Work -30%, Management -27% | Cancún, Scottsdale, Boca Raton, Naples, California |
| Automotive Parts and Accessories Retailers | Support +38% | Manual Work -23% | Houston, Brazil, UK |
| Language Schools | Quality Assurance +48%, Product Management +43% | None in the tracked mix | Brazil, Italy, São Paulo, India, Curitiba, Germany |
| Jewelry Retailers | Sales +19% | Manual Work -25% | UAE, New York, New South Wales, Queensland, UK |
| Janitorial Services | Protective Services +503% | Management -41%, Operations -24% | France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK |
| Sporting Goods Retailers | Legal +254%, Quality Assurance +156% | None in the tracked mix | France, Fargo, Sioux Falls, Canada, UK |
| Sporting and Athletic Goods Manufacturing | Support +45% | Manual Work -16% | France, Beaverton, Germany, Nagano |
| Used Car Dealers | Purchasing +44%, Operations +38% | None in the tracked mix | Germany, France, Indio, Tempe, Greenfield |
Three entries need their caveat stated up front. Language Schools is a concentration story before it is a market story: one Brazilian franchise chain, English Guru, accounts for roughly 45% of the industry’s current hiring volume, so read this entry as franchise expansion rather than a broad market move. Janitorial Services growth is driven heavily by European home-services marketplaces such as Homeservice24 and Viku rather than by traditional single-employer contractors, which means a posting there can represent gig-style demand rather than corporate headcount. And Golf Courses and Country Clubs is riding a seasonal layer: it is up 15.4% month over month and 16.8% against its own 90-day pace, while reading as down 17.2% on the longer 90-versus-90 view because it is coming off its summer peak.
Exam Preparation and Tutoring is hiring to build the platform, not the tutor roster
Total postings in this industry grew 16.0% month over month, but the mix moved in the opposite direction from the headline. Postings for core education roles, meaning tutors, fell 13%. Quality Assurance postings grew 495% off a small base, and Engineering grew 73%. These companies are hiring to build and test the product, not to expand the teaching roster, which is a very different buying profile: ed-tech infrastructure, testing tooling, learning platforms, and cross-border payments for genuinely international operations spanning the US, India, the UAE, the UK, and Japan. One caveat belongs in the same breath: some operators here are gig-style tutor marketplaces, so a posting can represent demand for an independent tutor rather than single-employer headcount. Study Guide Zone is the clearest example, newly active this month and already posting 533 openings, overwhelmingly tutor-titled, a pattern that reads as a marketplace launch rather than organic headcount growth.
Used Car Dealers are scaling operations before sales
This industry shows the single sharpest acceleration against its own recent pace in the entire Top 10, at 33.1% above its 90-day baseline, with Carvana, CarMax, and Auto1 Group all ramping simultaneously. The function mix is the tell: Operations postings are growing more than twice as fast as Sales, at 38% versus 17%, and Purchasing is the fastest grower at 44%. These dealers are scaling reconditioning, logistics, and fulfillment capacity ahead of front-line sales staff, not behind it. That sequencing points at dealer-management systems, online-to-offline logistics software, and financing infrastructure as the near-term budget lines. Newly active names sit alongside the giants: Peak Motors moved from zero to 45 openings this month, and UK specialist Redline Classic Cars is up 268% against a 35-per-month baseline. For the longer-run automotive picture, our report on auto tariffs and automotive hiring data tracks the manufacturer side of the same market.
Jewelry Retailers started holiday staffing in August
Openings grew 7.4% month over month, led by Sales at 63.8% of all postings and up 19%, across a genuinely global set of retailers including Lovisa, Signet, Swarovski, Chalhoub Group, and Louis Vuitton. The most specific signal is a job title: “festive stylist,” a holiday-season role, is already among the top titles being posted in August. Jared, a Signet brand, is up 821% against a 14-per-month baseline. Australia produced a textbook cluster, with Prouds, Goldmark, and Angus & Coote all accelerating together in a range of 355% to 401%. Three unrelated chains moving in the same country in the same month usually indicates a market-wide event rather than one company’s plan, and that is the shape of signal a batch outbound motion is built for.
Tour Operators are posting for AI engineers
The top-ranked industry grew openings 12.1% month over month and is running 19.7% hot against its own 90-day pace across 747 companies worldwide, with Food the fastest-growing function at 154% and Manual Work close behind at 49%. The surprising detail is a title: “AI engineer” is now among the top emerging job titles at tour operators, which is a literal signal that travel companies are building AI into booking and personalization rather than only buying it. The single sharpest company-level acceleration found anywhere in this analysis also sits here: TravelShop Booking in Turkey went from a 49-per-month baseline to 855 openings in the current window.
Across seven of the Top 10, a support, quality-assurance, engineering, or legal function is growing faster than the industry’s dominant customer-facing role. That is the cross-industry version of the tutoring finding. These companies are hiring to run the operation better, not only to staff more shifts, and that is the type of shift that shows up as a software requirement a quarter later. PredictLeads categorizes every posting against 26 job categories and 11 seniority levels using O*NET occupation codes, so a change in what a company hires for is a filter, not an inference.
Three hidden signals inside the hiring data
The ranking is the visible output. The findings below are the ones you cannot reproduce by counting job postings, and they are the more actionable half of this report.
1. Financing shows up during the plateau, not during the spike
Start with the intuitive part: companies with any current job openings are 3.2x more likely to have closed a financing round in the past 12 months than companies with none, at 2.029% against 0.636%. Then split the hiring companies by whether they are accelerating or decelerating against their own recent pace, and the pattern inverts. Companies whose hiring is slowing down are financed at 2.999%. Companies whose hiring is speeding up are financed at only 1.688%, nearly half the rate.
Read the two together and financing looks less like a trigger for a hiring spike and more like something that surfaces a few months into a hiring plateau, consistent with companies front-loading a post-raise hiring surge and then leveling off by the time a 30-day snapshot catches them. The newly active cohort settles the direction: companies that posted nothing for five months and are now hiring are financed at just 0.576%, below the overall baseline. So this is not evidence that funding causes new hiring waves. It is a correlation specific to the deceleration phase, and the practical implication is uncomfortable for the standard playbook: if you only work funded accounts, you may be arriving after the growth phase rather than during it. Our guide to building outreach workflows around trigger data covers how to sequence multiple triggers instead of relying on funding alone.
2. A quarter of these accounts were not hiring five months ago
Across the Top 10, an average of 25.6% of companies with active job openings today posted nothing at all in the preceding five months. The range runs from 19.3% at Golf Courses and Country Clubs to 33.0% at Language Schools. These are the least-contacted, highest-intent accounts in any of these industries, for a structural reason: no outbound rep has been working them, because six months ago there was nothing to work. There is no incumbent vendor relationship formed during a hiring push, and no competing rep already in the inbox. Tutopiya in Singapore, Vamos Academy International in Spain, and Peak Motors in the United States all fit that profile this month. Tracking that transition is a matter of comparing a company’s current window against its own trailing history, which is the same mechanic behind prioritizing accounts by hiring signals.
3. The momentum is broad, not three large employers
Across the Top 10, a median of 74% of currently-hiring companies are posting more openings than their own trailing baseline. After the company-level cap and the concentration gate, no single company accounts for more than a quarter of any industry’s current volume. This matters because the most common failure mode in industry-level hiring analysis is one giant employer setting an entire category’s numbers. Automotive Parts and Accessories Retailers is the closest case in this ranking, where AutoZone alone accounts for roughly a quarter of current volume, and it is a genuinely large real retailer rather than a data artifact. Everywhere else, the movement is distributed, which is what makes a batch prospecting motion viable rather than a single-account play.
Five industries we cut after checking who was behind the numbers
Five industries scored high enough on the formula alone to make this Top 10 and were removed after inspecting the specific companies driving them. This is the part a generic labor-market dataset cannot do, because the distortion is invisible at the aggregate level and obvious the moment you look at which domains the postings came from.
| Industry that scored high | What was actually driving the volume |
|---|---|
| Periodical Publishers | Trade-journal websites running job-classifieds sections that list other employers’ vacancies in their industry, plus one professional association’s job board. |
| Newspaper Publishers | The same pattern at local scale: community-news portals functioning as informal classifieds boards. |
| Grantmaking Foundations | Hospital-system philanthropic arms whose career pages inherit the parent health system’s entire job feed. The top title was “registered nurse.” |
| Libraries and Archives | Real library systems mixed with general government job portals whose postings span every department, not just libraries. |
One company-level artifact inside a Top 10 industry was caught the same way. Bridgestone Golf, classified under Sporting and Athletic Goods Manufacturing, posted “automotive technician” as its top title, with 4,122 occurrences over the 180-day window traced to that single domain, evidently inheriting parent company Bridgestone’s much larger tire-and-automotive-service job feed. The concentration gate already held, so the industry’s score was unaffected, but the feed was excluded from the published function and title breakdown. Do not read “automotive technician” as a sporting-goods manufacturing role. This is the same discipline that separates a real ramp from a coverage change in competitor hiring spikes: check the domains behind the number before you act on it.
How to turn hiring momentum into an account list
Hiring momentum is not proof that a company will buy anything. It is a proxy for where budget, headcount, and organizational attention are moving right now, which is exactly what a territory plan should be built around. Five plays follow directly from the findings above.
- Prioritize newly-active accounts over big, steady hirers. A company posting its first jobs in five months has no incumbent vendor relationship formed during a growth push and no rep already in its inbox. In these ten industries, that is roughly one in four of every currently-hiring company.
- Read the function mix, not just the headcount. A services company suddenly posting quality-assurance or engineering roles is usually investing in the platform behind the business, which tends to arrive with new software and tooling budget. Exam Preparation and Tutoring is the clearest case in this run.
- Watch the plateau, not only the spike. Because financing shows up more often once a company’s hiring pace has already leveled off, the highest-intent buying window for many tools can open a few months after the visible hiring surge rather than during it.
- Batch-prospect real clusters instead of individual companies. When several companies in the same country and industry accelerate together, as the three Australian jewelry chains did this month, it usually reflects a market-wide event, and a batch outbound motion beats one-off account research.
- Route territory by geography, not only by company size. Tutoring and language-training hiring is concentrated in Brazil, Italy, and India right now, which is a specific signal for anyone selling HR, payroll, or learning software into those markets this quarter.
Each of those plays is a filter on the same underlying records rather than a separate research project. If you want the step-by-step version of turning postings into a working list, our walkthrough on using job-openings data for sales prospecting covers the query patterns, and what hiring data engineers signals about tooling adoption shows the function-mix play applied to a single role family.
Reading these numbers responsibly
Methodology and caveats.
- Source: PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data. Current window is the 30 days from July 29 to August 27, 2026, compared against the prior 30 days and the 90 days immediately preceding.
- Sample: 1,305,998 companies with at least one approved job opening found in the trailing 180 days, after removing job-board, news, forum, classifieds, and venture-capital records. 83.6% had a usable industry classification.
- Demand, not hires: these figures count job openings, which measure hiring demand and intent, not confirmed hires or headcount. They also reflect online posting activity as tracked globally, not a census of all hiring, and they do not capture unposted or word-of-mouth roles.
- Business models vary: some industries here include marketplace or franchise operators, where a posting can represent gig-style demand rather than single-employer headcount. This is flagged in-line for Exam Preparation and Tutoring, Janitorial Services, and Language Schools.
- Industry classification: each company is assigned its primary declared line of business. Secondary lines are not captured, so a diversified company sits in one category only.
- Horizon matters: the score weights 30-day and 90-day-baseline signals and reports the longer 90-versus-90 view separately, because several genuinely accelerating industries look like they are cooling on that horizon simply by being past a seasonal peak.
- No causal claims: every relationship reported here, including the financing finding, is a correlation. Nothing in this analysis establishes that one factor causes another.
Powered by PredictLeads Job Openings Data
Every number in this report came from one dataset queried at scale, which is the point. PredictLeads Job Openings holds 279.2M+ historical 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, seniority, salary_data, and onet_data across 26 job categories, which is what makes a per-industry pace calculation, a function-mix comparison, and a newly-active flag queryable rather than manual. You can review the dataset on the Job Openings page and the field-level schema in the PredictLeads documentation.
The findings get sharper when hiring is read next to other company signals, which is how the financing result in this report was produced in the first place. Financing Events covers 210,800+ events since 2016 with normalized types from pre_angel through series_j, News Events covers 10M+ signals since 2016 across 37 categories including increases_headcount_by and opens_new_location, and Companies anchors all of it across 130.7M+ company records in 195 countries. Once a pattern like the Australian jewelry cluster appears, Similar Companies extends it to lookalikes for 18.9M+ companies with a written reason attached to each match, which is the mechanic behind finding companies similar to your best customers. Teams that run all of these together, the approach we describe in combining hiring, news, funding, and technology signals, get a timing read that no single dataset produces alone.
PredictLeads is a data provider, not a platform, so all of this is delivered by API, flat files, webhooks, and MCP into whatever you already run, whether that is a CRM, a warehouse, or an agent workflow. Companies including Clay, Instantly, Surfe, and Common Room build on it. Everything is sourced from public data only, and PredictLeads is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR and CCPA compliant. If you are evaluating where this fits against other options, our comparison of job posting and hiring intent data providers lays out the criteria that matter.
Final thoughts on hiring momentum
The industries accelerating hiring right now are not the ones a sector-level chart would send you to, and they are not the ones a raw-volume ranking would surface either. Tour operators, tutoring platforms, country clubs, and used-car dealers do not make headlines about the labor market, and that is precisely why the accounts inside them are under-contacted. The two findings worth carrying out of this report are that a quarter of these hirers were silent five months ago, and that funding tends to arrive after the acceleration rather than before it. Both invert the default prospecting instinct, and both are only visible when you compare a company against its own history rather than against its peers.
Industry-level momentum tells you where to point a territory. The accounts a rep actually works, the ones that just crossed from silent to hiring or just stood up a function they did not have six months ago, live one level down and are worth tracking continuously rather than reconstructing once for an article.
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Frequently Asked Questions
In the 30 days from July 29 to August 27, 2026, the ten industries accelerating hiring fastest were Tour Operators, Exam Preparation and Tutoring, Golf Courses and Country Clubs, Automotive Parts and Accessories Retailers, Language Schools, Jewelry Retailers, Janitorial Services, Sporting Goods Retailers, Sporting and Athletic Goods Manufacturing, and Used Car Dealers. Median month-over-month job-opening growth across the ten was 12.2%. This is a ranking of acceleration against each industry’s own recent pace, not of total hiring volume. It was produced from PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data covering 1,305,998 companies and 200 scored industries.
A ranking of the industries hiring the most measures raw volume and is won by whichever categories employ the most people, which returns roughly the same answer every month. Hiring momentum measures how fast an industry is hiring relative to its own recent pace, so a change of direction outranks size. In this run, Tour Operators topped the ranking with 2,659 openings while one of the largest raw-volume industries in the same dataset posted 191,117. For a GTM team, the momentum view is the more useful one, because it identifies where something just changed.
The Hiring Momentum Score blends five percentile-ranked signals: 30% acceleration against the industry’s own 90-day pace, 25% month-over-month change in openings, 20% growth in the number of companies hiring, 15% share of hirers beating their own baseline, and 10% share newly active after five silent months. Percentile-ranking each component across all 200 eligible industries lets a small industry and a large one compete on the shape of the trend rather than on size. Each company’s monthly count is also capped at the 97th percentile of its own industry before totals are summed. PredictLeads Job Openings records carry first_seen_at and last_seen_at, which is what makes a per-industry pace calculation possible.
Hiring data is a reliable proxy for where budget, headcount, and organizational attention are moving, not proof that a company will buy. It works best when you read the function mix rather than the headcount, since a services company posting quality-assurance or engineering roles is usually investing in the platform behind the business. It also works best stacked with other signals, because financing on its own points in a counterintuitive direction. PredictLeads Job Openings records carry O*NET-coded categories across 26 job categories and 11 seniority levels, so the function-mix read is a filter rather than a guess.
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services, the broad sector containing software companies, IT services firms, consultancies, and engineering practices, posted the second-sharpest month-over-month decline of the 20 sectors measured, down 3.2%. That does not mean tech hiring has stopped. It means the sector is not where the rate of change is right now, so a prospecting motion built on the assumption that it is will be aimed at the flattest part of the market. Sector-level readings also hide sub-industry divergence, which is why two education sub-industries rank in the Top 10 while their parent sector scored second-lowest overall at 22.5.
You compare each company’s current 30-day posting activity against its own trailing history and flag the ones that posted nothing for the prior five months. Across the ten industries in this ranking, an average of 25.6% of currently-hiring companies met that test, ranging from 19.3% at Golf Courses and Country Clubs to 33.0% at Language Schools. These accounts tend to be the least contacted, because there was nothing to contact them about six months ago. Because every PredictLeads job opening is timestamped with first_seen_at and linked to a company record, that comparison is a query against 279.2M+ historical postings rather than a manual audit.
Not according to this data. Companies with any current job openings are 3.2x more likely to have raised in the past 12 months than companies with none, at 2.029% against 0.636%. But among hiring companies, those decelerating against their own recent pace are financed at 2.999% while those accelerating are financed at only 1.688%. Newly active hirers are financed at just 0.576%, below the overall baseline. Financing correlates with the plateau phase rather than the acceleration phase, and none of these figures establishes causation in either direction.
Among the Top 10, Jewelry Retailers is the most sales-weighted, with Sales at 63.8% of all postings and growing 19% against the 90-day baseline. Sporting Goods Retailers follows with Sales at 46.3% of postings and up 12%. Tour Operators grew Sales postings 21% and Marketing 24%, and Used Car Dealers grew Sales 17%. In seven of the ten industries, though, a support, quality-assurance, engineering, or legal function is growing faster than the dominant customer-facing role.
Hiring momentum measures posted job openings, which represent demand for labor, while headcount growth measures people actually employed. Openings are a leading indicator that can move months before headcount does, and some openings are never filled. The Bureau of Labor Statistics draws the same distinction in its JOLTS definitions, treating openings as a point-in-time stock measure and hires as a flow measure. Read every figure in this report as evidence of hiring intent and organizational attention, not as a headcount number.
Automotive parts, jewelry, sporting goods, and used vehicles are four unrelated retail categories accelerating in the same 30-day window, which is more consistent with a market-wide pre-holiday staffing build than with any one chain expanding. The clearest supporting detail is a job title: festive stylist, a holiday-season role, was already among the top titles posted by jewelry retailers in August. The National Retail Federation has separately noted that some seasonal hiring can be pulled forward to support October buying events. Earlier and broader is what this data shows for August 2026.
It usually means the company is investing in the platform behind the business rather than staffing more shifts, and that tends to arrive with new software and tooling budget. Exam Preparation and Tutoring is the clearest case in this ranking: total postings grew 16.0% month over month while core tutor-role postings fell 13% and quality-assurance postings grew 495% off a small base. Language Schools shows the same shape with Quality Assurance up 48% and Product Management up 43%. PredictLeads categorizes every posting against 26 O*NET-coded job categories, so this shift is measurable per company.
Statistical filters are not enough on their own. In this analysis, five industries cleared every threshold and were still removed after inspecting the specific companies driving them: trade-publication websites running job-classifieds sections for other employers, community-news portals acting as informal classifieds boards, hospital-system philanthropic arms inheriting their parent health system’s job feed, and government job portals mixed in with real library systems. One company-level artifact was also caught inside a Top 10 industry, where a subsidiary’s career page inherited its parent’s much larger automotive-service job feed. PredictLeads excludes job-board, news, forum, classifieds, and venture-capital records at the sample stage, and this ranking added a manual company-level review on top.
Yes. PredictLeads Job Openings is available by API, flat files, webhooks, and MCP, so you can pull a company’s postings by location, O*NET category, and seniority and build your own current-versus-baseline windows. The dataset holds 279.2M+ postings since 2018 across 2.9M+ websites, with 10.2M active openings at any time and 710,600+ companies currently hiring. Because every record is point-in-time and timestamped, hiring velocity, newly-active flags, and function-mix shifts are all queryable. A free account includes 100 API requests to test the fields on real companies.