B2B SaaS hiring · every company verified
The state of B2B SaaS hiring.
Measured weekly, not surveyed.
Weekly numbers from 27,582 live B2B SaaS companies. We read each company's job pages directly. Dead companies removed. Agencies never counted.
Key numbers
issue 11 · week of 28 sep 2026Companies hiring now
Open roles
Open leadership roles
Share of companies hiring ▼ −1.1 pp
arrow: same companies, 4 weeks
Hiring index ▼ −7.9 %
In September we began tracking far more companies — from 7,300 to 27,582. Figures marked "this week" include them all. Trend lines compare only companies we were already tracking, so our growth never shows up as a hiring boom.
The index
baseline 100 = week of 20 jul 2026open roles per 100 companies · chain-linked
Open roles per 100 companies. Each week compared against the same set of companies as the week before, so adding new companies to the database never moves the line.
Key numbers this week
this week · copy them as they are, free with a link to assaybase.io
of companies have at least one open role.
open roles per 100 live companies.
of open roles are engineering — the largest function.
of open roles are Head-of level or above.
of open roles are AI roles, across 1,209 companies.
customer-success share of openings: sales-led vs product-led.
companies hiring a Head-of where we find no current leader.
companies hiring now, of 27,582 checked alive.
Every number comes straight from the database. Week of 28 Sep 2026, AssayBase.
Leadership gaps
Only on AssayBase this weekCompanies hiring a Head-of for a function where we find no current leader. This crosses two datasets nobody else combines: who a company is hiring for, and who already leads there.
Companies gapping, by function
Hiring mix: product-led vs sales-led
Only on AssayBasethis week · share of each side's open roles · hybrids grouped with their leading side
All open roles
Leadership roles only · 584 PLG · 3,068 SLG
Reading the market · September 2026
The clearest split between the two kinds of company is still customer success. Sales-led companies give it 9.5% of their openings; product-led companies give it 6.9%. Marketing leans the other way: 8.7% of openings at product-led companies against 5.7% at sales-led ones. A company that sells through people hires people to keep its customers. A company that sells through its website hires people to bring customers in. Every company in this comparison carries a checked go-to-market label: product-led means you can buy it without talking to anyone.
Where the roles are
this weekShare of all open roles
Leadership openings · 3,952 roles · count and share of all leadership openings
590 more leadership openings have titles that don't sort into any tracked function.
Size and geography
Open roles per 100 employees · this week · covers 88% of companies
Small companies hire harder relative to their size. A band with fewer than 30 companies keeps its label and loses its bar; the largest band is open-ended, so it never gets a rate.
Roles per 100 companies registered there · covers 91% of companies; top 10 shown
Open roles per 100 companies registered there — the country of the company's legal entity, not where the job is. Top 10 shown; countries with fewer than 150 companies are left out. And 9 more countries measured.
How these numbers are made
The corpus is 27,582 live, verified B2B SaaS companies. Each one passed a SaaS check before entering, and dead or acquired companies are removed. We read careers pages and job feeds directly from each company, every week. No job boards, no agencies, no duplicates. Talent-pool adverts and general-application forms are stored but never counted as openings.
Every line on this page is a rate, never a raw count. Each week is compared only against the same companies in the previous week, so growing coverage never fakes a trend. The technical name for it is a chain-linked matched-panel index; the practical effect is that when we start reading 500 more companies' job boards, none of the lines move. Raw counts appear only as this-week figures — the three numbers at the top, the key numbers, the share bars, the go-to-market card and the country table — each carrying the week it was taken.
One function is missing from the chart on purpose. Some job titles cannot be sorted into a function at all; we count them, and they appear as “Other” in the share of all open roles. But we do not draw them as a line. When that bucket moves it usually means we have got better or worse at reading job titles, not that companies have changed what they hire for, and a line cannot tell those two apart. It moved sharply in August 2026 for exactly that reason: about 1,200 postings we had never managed to classify left our data in two weeks.
The index is set to 100 in the week of 20 Jul 2026 and does not start earlier because our job data does not: the first company job board was read on 16 July 2026, and any number before that would be invented. The weeks from 20 Jul 2026 to 17 Aug 2026 are rebuilt from stored posting history rather than measured live. Size intensity uses employee-band midpoints. The country table uses each company's headquarters, because a posting's location is free text with no country in it. Leadership-gap counts rest on our leadership data, which covers 39% of companies, and claim only what we can see.
The trend line counts only companies we were already watching, so adding new companies does not move it.
Any figure on this page, free with a link to assaybase.io. Cite as “AssayBase SaaS Hiring Index”. The weekly series CSV arrives by email.