Giacomo Collesei & Karimi.AI · published September 2026 · 25,800 European job adverts posted May–August 2026

What different employers ask, when hiring for the same job

Which requirements follow the job, and which follow the industry? An analysis of software and sales roles, each posted across eleven industries.

METHOD

How the methodology works

1Requirement text → 349,061 single requirements. I split the requirements into single strings, at times splitting one sentence into multiple in order to be as specific as possible.

2Each requirement → 384 numbers. I represented semantically the single requirements: Kenntnisse in SQL and SQL knowledge have similar values.

3Numbers → 594 groups. Semantic representations are here grouped into clusters.

4Groups → core and shell. I compared a group's share in one cell against the job family's own baseline.

DATA

An intro to the job postings

Karimi builds a database of European companies and the jobs they advertise, taken from public listings on company pages. It holds more than 5,600 companies and hundreds of thousands of postings.

This page uses one slice of that database. The adverts were posted from May to August 2026, for two kinds of role, software and data, and sales and business development, across eleven industries. The chart below shows the distribution of five different factors at once.

Each circle is one industry. Adverts: the area is the number of postings, and the count is written beside the circle. Hover a circle for how many companies posted them. Senior: the area is the number of postings looking for a senior role. Hybrid or remote: the area shows the number of postings as hybrid or remote. Companies: the area represents the concentration of companies per industry. Note that Companies is drawn on its own scale: the first three blocks all count adverts and share one, so a circle there and an equal circle under Companies do not stand for the same number.

Industry, country, seniority — which one really changes the job?

Read the article: two factors looked strongest, for two different reasons →

Which requirements follow the job, and which belong to one industry?

Read the article: what follows the job, and what is asked for twenty times more often →

What these numbers will not carry

These are advertised requirements, not the labour market. Posted is not the same as existing, and large employers are over-represented by construction.
Extraction finds about 80% of requirements, and misses them unevenly. Every figure here is a share of adverts, never a count of requirements per advert.
One requirement type — domain knowledge — is correctly identified 27% of the time. Any claim resting on it carries that number.
A third of the uncatalogued demand has no reason assigned, and part of it is our own grouping rather than a gap in the catalogue.
Every magnitude is a range. The consistent shape of these results is a stable direction over an unstable size.

Every figure regenerates from the analysis scripts. Twenty-five known defects are tracked with their measured sizes; none of them moves a headline, which is the most persuasive thing this study can say.