Our data is provided by Aspen Technology Labs (Aspen), a global labour market intelligence and recruitment technology company.

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Aspen collects job postings directly from company career websites and Applicant Tracking Systems(ATS), including the platforms where candidates submit their applications.

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Unlike many other labour market data providers, Aspen does not rely on scraping job boards oraggregators. This helps reduce duplicate listings and provides a more direct view of employer hiring demand.

Aspen's database covers approximately 70% of U.S. job openings, providing a broad and representative view of hiring activity across the country.

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Its coverage includes employers of different sizes, industries and locations, rather than focusing exclusively on large corporations or publicly listed companies.

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While the database does not capture every vacancy, its scale allows us to identify meaningful hiring trends over time.

Aspen's jobs database is updated daily, allowing it to track changes in employer hiring activity as new vacancies appear and existing listings are removed.

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For our reports, we use weekly snapshots to analyse changes in the number of live vacancies and compare hiring trends over time.

Our reports focus exclusively on full-time, in-house marketing positions based in the United States. We track marketing roles across different seniority levels, disciplines, locations and salary ranges. Agency positions, freelance assignments, contract roles and part-time jobs are excluded.

We use three key measures to understand hiring activity:

• Total active job listings: The number of distinct vacancies that were active at any point during the reporting period.
• New job postings: Vacancies first identified during the reporting period.
• Live vacancies: The number of positions still advertised and available at a specific point in time, such as the final week of a quarter

These measures provide different perspectives on hiring demand. Total active listings reflect the volume of opportunities available throughout a period, while live vacancies provide a snapshot of the market at a particular moment.

Job posting lifetimemeasures the number of days a vacancy remains advertised before it is removed. It provides anindication of how long positions remain open in the market.

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However, postinglifetime is not necessarily the same as time-to-hire. A job may be removedbecause it has been filled, cancelled or taken offline for another reason.

We use two standard comparisons:

• Year-over-year (YoY): Compares a metric with the equivalent period one year earlier.
• Quarter-over-quarter (QoQ): Compares a metric with the preceding quarter.

These comparisons help distinguish longer-term changes in hiring demand from shorter-term fluctuations.

For quarter-endvacancy figures, we compare the weekly snapshots taken at the end of each reporting period.

Marketing vacancies are grouped by job level, ranging from entry-level and specialist positions through management, director, VP and C-suite roles.

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For our seniormarketing hiring analysis, Director-level and above positions are classified as senior roles.

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We also group vacancies by marketing discipline, including General Marketing, Brand Marketing, Product Marketing, Growth Marketing, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Communications & PR and other specialisations.

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These classificationsallow us to examine which types of marketing roles are experiencing the strongest changes in demand.

Aspen continually expands its database by identifying and adding new employers. However, changes in database coverage can affect reported job volumes, even when underlying hiring demand has not changed.

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To minimise this effect, Aspen applies adjustments to quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year comparisons. These adjustments typically exclude the 10 most impactful newly added employers and 10 most impactful recently dropped employers whose inclusion or removal could disproportionately influence the results.

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This targeted approach helps ensure that reported changes reflect actual hiring trends rather than changes in data coverage.

As Aspen expands its coverage and improves data quality, historical figures may be recalculated to maintain consistent comparisons.

When adjustments are made for a new reporting period, the same updated methodology and filters are applied retrospectively to the historical data used for comparison.

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As a result, a figure published in an earlier quarterly report may differ slightly from the historical figure used in a later report.

These revisions do not necessarily indicate a change in past hiring activity. They reflect improvements in the consistency and accuracy of the underlying dataset.

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For this reason, we recommend using the figures within the same report when making YoY or QoQ comparisons.

Our data review process also identifies unusual posting patterns that could distort the overall market picture. Examples include employers advertising an unexpectedly large number of vacancies over a short period, duplicate listings, and job boards or recruitment platforms incorrectly classified as direct employers.

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Where appropriate, these records are investigated and excluded from the analysis to protect the reliability of our findings.

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An unusual posting pattern does not necessarily indicate fraudulent activity, but it may require further examination before the data is included.

No. Job postings measure advertised hiring demand, not completed hires.

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A vacancy may be advertised without resulting in a hire, and some companies may recruit multiple candidates through a single listing.

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Our reports therefore measure changes in the availability of advertised job opportunities rather than the number of people who have started new jobs.

Salary information is extracted from job advertisements that include compensation details.

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Our reports examine advertised salaries by seniority level, marketing discipline and geographic location.

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We also track salary transparency, measured as the percentage of vacancies that include salary information.

The median advertised salary represents the middle of the salary distribution in the analysed job listings. We also report the 25th and 75th percentiles to show how advertised salaries are distributed across the market.

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Unlike an average, the median is less affected by unusually high or low salary figures.

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It is important to remember that advertised salaries are not necessarily the same as salaries ultimately paid to employees. Changes in median advertised salaries may also reflect changes in the types and seniority of roles being advertised.