Analysis · October 29, 2026 · data as of October 29, 2026

Hired Creative listings per capita and the WIPO creative outputs score

Across 49 countries, listings per million people show a modest raw link to WIPO's 2025 Creative outputs score (0.345) and no detectable link once income is held fixed.

In the Hired Creative listings export of 2026-10-29, listings per million inhabitants show a modest rank correlation of 0.345 with the Creative outputs score of the WIPO Global Innovation Index 2025. The base is 49 countries with at least 30 placed listings each (18,457 listings). Once GDP per capita is held fixed (48 countries), the partial correlation is -0.249, with a 95% bootstrap interval of -0.461 to 0.046, which is no detectable association. This piece reports why a per-capita count from Hired Creative's listings should not be read as a measure of creative-economy strength.

Key points

• Across 49 countries with at least 30 listings each, Hired Creative's listings per million people have a modest positive link to WIPO's 2025 Creative outputs score (0.345).
• With national income held fixed, 48 countries show no detectable link (-0.249, interval -0.461 to 0.046). This does not show that no link exists.
• Counts per million depend on which sources, cities and keywords Hired Creative collects, so they should not be read as a measure of creative-economy strength.

What the data covers

The export holds 20,562 listings. A parser placed 18,850 of them (91.7%) to one country, and 18,834 (91.6% of all rows) sit in one of the 139 economies that WIPO scores. The remaining 1,712 (8.3%) are remote roles with no country, listings with "N locations", listings that name several countries, or text the parser could not read. A hand-read of three random samples of 100 placed rows found one wrong placement in each of the first two samples (both fixed in the parser) and none in the third, which ran on the final parser. Rows that were not placed were not checked in full.

Source mix matters before any country comparison. Of all listings, 47.2% (9,711) come from LinkedIn feeds, 32.2% (6,611) from employer applicant-tracking and career sites, 17.6% (3,615) from job boards and remote-job aggregators, and 3.0% (625) from other sources. Among the 49 countries in the test, 32 get more than half of their listings from LinkedIn feeds.

The LinkedIn feeds are keyword searches over a fixed set of locations: 8 to 12 locations per feed, 2 pages per search. Four feeds (mena, africa, asia, latam) share one 26-keyword list. That list includes roles beyond design and creative production, such as machine learning engineer and frontend developer. The Europe feed uses a different 20-keyword list. The file describing the collection lists the same 20 keywords for the US feed but also notes that the configuration names its own set, so the US feed's final keyword list is not known here. Which cities and keywords a feed searches shapes its counts, and the exact locations are not stated.

The raw link and the income control

The WIPO Creative outputs pillar covers 139 economies and is built from 11 indicators: intangible asset intensity, trademarks, global brand value, industrial designs, creative services exports, national feature films, entertainment and media market, creative goods exports, top-level domains, GitHub commits and mobile app creation. None of the 11 counts creative jobs, job postings or creative employment.

Across the 49 countries, the rank correlation between log listings per million and the pillar score is 0.345 (permutation p = 0.017, 10,000 shuffles; bootstrap 95% interval 0.056 to 0.585).

Income complicates that. The pillar score correlates 0.732 with log GDP per capita, and listings per million correlate 0.715 with it. Among the 48 countries that have a GDP per capita figure in the WIPO file, controlling for it turns the 0.345 into a partial rank correlation of -0.249 (permutation p = 0.092; bootstrap 95% interval -0.461 to 0.046). That interval includes zero. With 48 countries, a result that cannot be told from zero is absence of evidence of a link, which is different from evidence of no link. Several pillar indicators are themselves scaled by GDP, so the tie of the score to income is expected.

Splitting by source

If one source were the cause of the noise, restricting to a cleaner source should show a link that survives the income control. It does not produce one. Each row below gives the raw correlation and the partial correlation after GDP per capita, with bootstrap 95% intervals.

• Employer applicant-tracking and career sites only (22 countries): raw 0.634 (0.284 to 0.847), partial 0.190 (-0.455 to 0.699).
• All non-LinkedIn listings (33 countries): raw 0.522 (0.212 to 0.733), partial -0.227 (-0.567 to 0.293).
• The four LinkedIn feeds that share one keyword list (26 countries): raw 0.201 (-0.241 to 0.600), partial -0.145 (-0.505 to 0.324), the partial computed on 25 countries.
• All LinkedIn feeds (39 countries): raw 0.196 (-0.135 to 0.507), partial -0.340 (-0.581 to 0.020), the partial computed on 38 countries.

In all four subsets the interval of the partial correlation includes zero. These subsets are small and their intervals wide, so they narrow nothing down. The raw values of the first two rows are positive with intervals above zero, and are not to be quoted without the partial beside them.

Three further specifications give the same pattern of a positive raw value and a negative partial value. Dropping the United States (48 countries): raw 0.319, partial -0.263. Using World Bank 2023 population in place of the WIPO population (49 countries): raw 0.345, partial -0.261. Replacing the pillar score with the entertainment and media market per thousand people aged 15 to 69, WIPO indicator 7.2.3 (45 countries): raw 0.526 (0.265 to 0.727), partial -0.110 (-0.408 to 0.289). These nine tests are run on largely the same countries and are not independent replications. The first, using all placed listings and the pillar score, was set as the primary test before any result was seen.

Four examples of how counts follow collection

The country figures below illustrate how a rate per million follows Hired Creative's collection. They are not a ranking of countries and say nothing about any country's market, government or employers.

• United Arab Emirates: 1,007 placed listings, 91.3 per million, 88% from LinkedIn feeds. Rank 35 of 139 on the pillar (score 36.1).
• Switzerland: 124 listings, 13.9 per million. Rank 1 (score 68.8).
• United States: 5,372 listings, 15.6 per million. Rank 5 (score 56.6).
• China: 116 listings, 0.1 per million, 0% from LinkedIn feeds. Rank 14 (score 49.7).

The data do not show why any one country's count is high or low.

Method

Data: the Hired Creative listings export of 2026-10-29 (20,562 live listings) and the WIPO Global Innovation Index 2025 database (139 economies). The Creative outputs score is the pillar score (0 to 100) for indicator group OUT.7. Population and GDP per capita (PPP dollars) are the figures in the WIPO file; one sensitivity row uses World Bank 2023 population (indicator SP.POP.TOTL).

Country placement: each listing's location text is parsed to a single country using country names, state or region names, city names, US state and Canadian province abbreviations, and two-letter country codes. Listings from a source that serves one country with no country in the text take that source's country. Listings that are remote without a country, say "N locations", or name several countries are left out of per-country counts.

Measures: listings per million inhabitants is the number of placed listings in a country divided by its population, then log10 transformed. Source families are LinkedIn feeds; employer applicant-tracking platforms and career sites; job boards and remote-job aggregators; and other sources (public sector, universities and miscellaneous). The minimum is 30 placed listings per country. Countries with fewer than 30 listings, and any whose separate reporting could identify a sensitive location, are pooled.

Statistics: Spearman rank correlation of log listings per million with the score. The partial correlation correlates the residuals of the ranks of each variable after regressing on the rank of log GDP per capita. Permutation p-values use 10,000 shuffles. The 95% intervals are percentile intervals from 10,000 bootstrap resamples of countries. Listings per million were treated as the primary measure and the pillar score as the primary outcome before results were seen. All nine specifications are reported.

Limits

• This does not show that creative economies are unrelated to creative hiring. It shows that Hired Creative's listings per capita cannot be used to test that link, because the counts reflect which boards are read and, for LinkedIn, which keywords and cities each feed searches.
• The sample is 49 countries, from 31 to 5,372 listings each, and it covers only the countries that clear the 30-listing minimum. A conclusion for those countries does not carry to the rest.
• A rank correlation across 49 countries is weak evidence. The raw interval (0.056 to 0.585) stays above zero, the partial interval (-0.461 to 0.046) includes zero, and neither result shows cause. The negative partial values are not evidence that creative strength lowers hiring. They mean the raw positive link goes away once income is held fixed.
• The WIPO pillar measures innovation outputs such as trademarks, designs, brand value, creative exports, films, domain names, code commits and apps. It is not a measure of creative employment or workforce size. GDP per capita is itself an input to several of its indicators.
• Country is parsed from free text. A hand-read of 100 placed rows found no wrong placement for the final parser, and 100 rows cannot rule out a small share of errors. Rows placed by a source default number 560. Dropping them leaves the result unchanged (raw 0.327, partial -0.267).
• The source families are Hired Creative's own grouping. The 11 indicators use different data years inside the pillar (for example 2023 for trademarks and 2024 for intangible asset intensity), and the data year of the population and GDP figures is not stated in the WIPO file.
• This is a snapshot of live listings in one export. Nothing here is a trend.
• Hired Creative did not find published work that compares job listings per capita with a creative-economy index, so the figures have no earlier result to be set against.

Sources

• WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2025 database (tech1 workbook)
• WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2025, Appendix III: sources and definitions
• WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2025, executive version
• World Bank, total population (SP.POP.TOTL), 2023
• Hired Creative listings export, 2026-10-29 (20,562 listings).

Published by Hired Creative from its own listings and the sources above. Spotted an error? Tell us.