A job opening that disappears from a site is not news in itself. A job opening that changes in description -- in which a role that used to require operational work now requires oversight of a system that does the operational work -- is. That second pattern is the signal this page is about.
Job postings from peers, competitors and partners are one of the few places where a company has to be honest, externally, about what it actually needs. A job description is not a press release. If a role that two years ago still required manual processing now asks for someone who reviews and corrects the output of a system, that is not there by accident. The same movement is visible in job openings that simply do not return after someone leaves, and in new job titles that did not exist two years ago. None of these three signals proves anything on its own. Together, over time, they show where in a sector work is shifting category: from human work to oversight, or from oversight to fully automatic.
Looking daily mostly produces noise -- a single job opening says little. Looking once a year is too slow to spot a shift before a competitor has gained a two-year head start with it. A rhythm of every quarter, tied to your own planning cycle, provides enough job openings to distinguish a pattern from coincidence, and is fast enough to revise an assumption before it has contaminated a decision that has already been made.
A shift in job postings means that somewhere, at at least one party in the field, an assumption about what work in that role should involve has been abandoned. It means that the category into which a task falls -- taken over by AI, partly with oversight, or still human work -- has moved for that party. It means that your own assumption about the same role deserves a check: does it still hold, or has it become quietly outdated while no one withdrew it.
It does not mean that every peer in the sector makes the same move at the same time. The pace at which AI takes over work varies greatly by company, by function and by the degree of oversight an organization considers necessary before it dares to hand over a task. A job opening that changes at one competitor is a data point, not a law. Nor does it mean that your own organization must do something about its staff. What an employer decides about existing functions and employees falls under its own legal requirements for labor law and employee participation; this page provides no basis and no advice for that. What is being tracked here is the signal, not the personnel decision that another company has made with it.
At companies where management treats sector job openings as a recurring agenda item, a shift is usually noticed within a quarter and linked to the company's own list of assumptions. At companies where that does not happen, the shift only becomes visible at the moment a competitor has already freed up FTE capacity that the company's own organization is still trying to recruit for. The difference is not in access to information -- job postings are public -- but in whether someone structurally holds them up against the company's own assumptions. The same applies to the movements that complement this signal: what suppliers announce as AI functionality in their own product, what happens to the price of AI capacity relative to human capacity, and whether new entrants are appearing in the market that operate with a fraction of the usual headcount. Four signals, one question: which assumption underlying your own strategy is meanwhile expiring.
The decision tied to this signal is not a personnel decision. It is the question of whether a strategic assumption -- about what a particular role must structurally continue to cost, about how many people a process requires, about where competitors are deploying their capacity -- is still based on how the sector looked two years ago. Such an assumption is up for checking, not for defending. What that means in practice and how to determine whether an assumption still holds is on the page about what a strategic assumption is and how to check whether it still holds. And if interpretations of such a signal already differ within your own management team, that itself is a signal: see what to do if management does not agree on priorities.
Job openings outside your own doors say something about the sector. The question that remains after that is what is going on inside your own doors: which work in this company can genuinely be taken over by AI, which work requires oversight and which work remains human work. That is a different question than what competitors show in their job postings, and that question is answered per task by the work scan from FTE TO AI. An additional, internal signal is also what your own people are already doing with AI, apart from what is stated in policy documents -- practice on the work floor often runs ahead of what management has officially established.
You can start with a list of three to five peers and competitors whose job openings are relevant to your own assumptions, and give that list a fixed place in your quarterly rhythm. If you want to know whether your own strategic assumptions still hold before you continue to build on them, there is the free assumption check: a short conversation in which you name your key assumptions and see, for each one, when it was last factually confirmed. The full strategic proof press, with sector data, a self-plot for management and a running list of assumptions, is under construction.
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Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.