On the job board this month

The board hit a new high in October. Live roles peaked at 9,773 mid-month and closed at 9,446, up 9% on September. Members posted 5,079 new roles. Strip out one bulk upload on 7 October and the everyday pace still rose, to about 180 new roles every working day, up from roughly 160.

The headline move: People & HR roles are up 26%, the biggest jump of any function. Companies are hiring the people who hire people. That’s what scaling looks like from the inside.

Marketing (+15%), data science (+13%) and product (+12%) followed. Last month we read a dip in product roles as leaner teams. October says: not so fast. Finance and compliance postings fell for a second month running, down 10% and 11%.

The mix underneath barely moved: 57% technical, just under a quarter sales, finance and operations.

1,271 Canvanauts just learned their roles are changing. If you’re hiring, some of the best-trained product and design people in the country are about to be looking. Put your roles where they’ll see them.

Hiring? Get your open roles in front of the community. Looking?
BROWSE THE JOB BOARD

Sources for this edition: Overnight Success, Letter of Intent, Capital Brief (Sweat Equity), alternatives.pe, InnovationAus, PitchBook, The Information, Startup Daily, SmartCompany, AFR, Cut Through Venture, Getro, and the IB VC AI Investment Tracker.

Job board analysis — October 2026

Internal read for the team. Period: 1–31 October 2026, compared with September (27 Aug – 23 Sep) and August (27 Jul – 25 Aug). Source: Getro exports.

The bottom line

Our members are hiring like companies past product-market fit: people, go-to-market and data roles are rising, while finance and compliance roles have shrunk two months in a row. The board’s headline size flatters it, though. Most of October’s growth came from two sync days, and momentum faded in the second half of the month. The real constraint on the board isn’t the number of roles. It’s how few people are clicking on them.

What changed from last month

• Live roles closed at 9,446, up 9% on September’s 8,630, and peaked at a record 9,773 on 17 October.
• Most of that growth is a data artefact. The board jumped 592 roles on 3 October and 755 on 6 October without matching new postings. That’s about 1,350 roles from two days, more than the month’s entire net growth.
• Removals beat additions again, as they did in August: 5,140 roles came off and 5,079 went on. On the flows alone, the board was flat.
• The pace of posting is the clean signal, and it improved. Excluding the 830-role bulk upload on 7 October, members posted about 180 roles per working day, up from about 161 in September (+12%).
• The second half of October went backwards. From 16 October, 2,837 roles came off against 2,322 added. In the last five days alone, 1,218 came off against 867 added. The board ended 327 roles below its mid-month peak.
• Function tags rose 5% overall (14,065, up from 13,407). Anything growing faster than 5% is gaining share; anything slower is losing it.