Analysis · October 27, 2026 · data as of October 27, 2026

Where Hired Creative's listings sit depends on where it looks

The United States is 11.0% of LinkedIn-search listings and 44.2% of employer career-site listings in the same export, so a country table maps collection.

Hired Creative's listings export (received 2026-10-27, 20,515 listings) puts the United States at 26.8% of the 18,777 listings that parsing could assign to exactly one country. The same listings give different answers by source. Among country-placed listings, the United States is 11.0% of LinkedIn search feeds (n=9,688), 44.2% of employer career sites (n=5,768) and 53.5% of remote and creative job boards (n=2,230). A country or city table built from these listings describes what Hired Creative collects. It does not show where creative hiring happens.

Key points

• The United States is 11.0% of LinkedIn-search listings placed to a country (n=9,688) but 44.2% of employer career-site listings (n=5,768).
• In each regional LinkedIn feed one country is the largest, which follows how that feed is set up, so feed shares are not market comparisons.
• A country or city table of these listings shows what Hired Creative collects, not where creative hiring happens.
• The top five countries keep their order when repeated listings are removed, but that holds for this export only.

What the export covers

The export has no country column. Country was read from the free-text location field, so it is approximate. Of 20,515 listings:

• 18,777 (91.5%) were placed to exactly one country.
• 134 (0.7%) name two or more countries. A few of these are single-country places whose names contain another country's name.
• 1,274 (6.2%) carry no geographic text, such as "remote", "onsite" or "3 locations".
• 330 (1.6%) looked geographic but could not be resolved.

Of the placed listings, 14,026 name the country in the text and 4,751 were inferred from a city, state or province. A listing counts for the country in its location text even when the text also says remote. That applies to 2,699 placed listings (14.4%). The figures below are therefore stated locations, not where a hire sits.

A country table, read at face value

Among the 18,777 country-placed listings, five countries hold 55.2%. Shares are of country-placed listings; as a share of all 20,515 listings the United States is 24.6%.

Read at face value, this is a league table of countries. It would invite the reading that the United States, India and the United Kingdom have the most creative jobs. The next section shows why the data do not support that reading.

The same listings, split by source

Hired Creative reads three kinds of source. LinkedIn search feeds return what their keyword and location lists ask for. Employer career sites and applicant-tracking pages return the companies Hired Creative has added. Remote and creative job boards return remote-friendly employers. Each is a different selection mechanism, and none is a random sample of creative hiring.

Other countries move the opposite way. India is first on LinkedIn feeds (15.8% of country-placed listings) and fifth on employer sites (3.7%). The United Arab Emirates is 9.1% of LinkedIn-feed listings and 0.3% of employer-site listings. These are three views of one set of listings, taken through three different doors.

A reader may ask whether the gap simply reflects LinkedIn feeds being pointed at regions outside the United States. That is the finding. Most LinkedIn feeds are set up for a region other than the United States, so a low US share there is what the set-up would predict. The 11.0% measures where Hired Creative looked.

Each regional feed has a dominant country

Inside the LinkedIn group, one country is the largest in each regional feed, in line with the feed's region as named. Shares are of country-placed listings in that feed.

• Middle East and North Africa feed (n=1,716): United Arab Emirates 51%.
• Asia feed (n=2,719): India 56%.
• Africa feed (n=1,126): Nigeria 42%.
• Latin America feed (n=1,231): Mexico 37%.
• Europe feed (n=1,325): United Kingdom 39%.
• Main US-search feed (n=1,441): United States 74%.

This follows how each feed is set up. The feeds use different keyword lists and search different numbers of locations, and those settings are not reported here. The shares should not be compared between feeds as differences between markets.

Cities change order with the source

13,759 listings (67.1% of all 20,515) could be placed to a city label. Labels are as written in the listing, so a district and its metro area can appear as separate places. Across all city-placed listings the five largest labels are:

• Bengaluru, 1,043 listings
• London, 922
• Dubai, 728
• New York, 693
• San Francisco, 604

Restricted to employer career sites and applicant-tracking pages (4,145 city-placed listings), the five largest are:

• San Francisco, 519 listings
• New York, 414
• London, 384
• Toronto, 174
• Los Angeles, 140

The two lists differ because they draw on different sources. They are shown only to illustrate that the order changes with source type. They are not a ranking of cities by creative hiring.

Method

Data: the Hired Creative listings export received 2026-10-27, 20,515 listings, one row per listing as collected from the sources Hired Creative reads.

Country: read from the free-text location field in this order. First, a country name or alias in the text. Second, a city lexicon learned from listings that do name a country, with cities that map to two countries excluded, plus a short hand-written list. Third, US state and Canadian province codes. Listings naming two or more countries are held apart as multi-country. Listings with text such as remote, onsite or a bare number of locations are held apart as non-geographic.

City: the first place name in the location text, accepted only if it is in the learned lexicon or the hand list. State-only and country-only strings get no city. A short alias list merges common variants of the same city, such as Bengaluru and Bangalore.

Source types: assigned from the name of the source. LinkedIn search feeds, employer applicant-tracking and career sites, and remote and creative job boards together cover 92.4% of listings. The remaining sources are not used in the source comparison. Shares by source type are of country-placed listings within that type.

Repeated listings: listings with the same title, company and location text were collapsed, and the top five countries and their order were compared before and after.

Minimum sample: 30 listings per country. Countries with fewer than 30 listings, and any whose separate reporting could identify a sensitive location, are pooled.

No interval is quoted. Listings are clustered by feed and by employer and the export is not a random sample, so an interval would suggest precision the data do not have. All figures are counts and shares for this export.

Limits

• This is a snapshot of one export. It shows nothing about change over time.
• It is a map of Hired Creative's collection. Country and city shares follow the sources read, the keyword list of each LinkedIn feed and the locations each feed searches. It cannot say which country or city has the most creative jobs.
• Country parsing is approximate. 8.4% of listings are not placed to one country. Some place names that contain another country's name are misread; the roughly 30 such listings found do not move the shares, but rarer formats are less tested. Bare names such as "Georgia" were read as the US state.
• City labels are less clean than country labels. City counts are not metro totals.
• Employer sites and remote boards have placement rates of 86.8% and 85.3%, so their shares are of placed listings only. Even if every unplaced employer-site listing were outside the United States, the US share of employer-site listings would be about 38%, against 11.0% on LinkedIn feeds.
• Listings are not jobs. One job can appear on several boards, and cross-board duplicates with different titles are not detected. A critic would add that LinkedIn wording and employer posting habits differ by country.
• Source types are Hired Creative's own grouping, and the LinkedIn group includes a feed not described in the collection notes.
• No outside dataset is joined, so no correlation or cause is reported. Employment statistics from national statistical offices would be the right outside benchmark; none was used here.

Sources

• Hired Creative listings export, received 2026-10-27 (20,515 listings).

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