The Bureau of Labor Statistics has managed to delay the jobs report, again.

Regular readers will know we have a… complicated relationship with BLS data, particularly the headline unemployment rate. It’s stitched together from phone and in-person surveys of roughly 60,000 households, with a response rate hovering around 68%. Old-school doesn’t quite cover it; it’s more rotary phone than smartphone.

Even so, if you look beyond the headline number, the report reveals some telling patterns. Under the U3 definition, anyone who worked more than an hour in the reference week is counted as employed. That includes people working part-time for both economic and non-economic reasons, whether or not that work reflects what they actually want or need.

Viewed over time, the number of part-time workers jumps sharply after 2008 and never truly returns to pre-crisis levels. There’s a modest easing through the 2010s, but at a noticeably higher plateau. COVID then resets the structure again, and since 2021 the trend has been drifting upward, reaching levels that echo the financial crisis years.

Another group sits even further outside the spotlight: people not officially in the labour force who still want a job. They’re available and willing, but excluded from the unemployment count altogether. That number, too, has been rising steadily.

I spent last week speaking at INSEAD and the ANA about the job market, which prompted a deeper look beyond the BLS. One useful alternative is ADP’s National Employment Report, which covers over 500,000 companies and more than 26 million employees. Over the past two years, it paints a clear picture: job growth has largely plateaued since March of last year.

The Challenger Report, which tracks layoffs, reinforces that view from another angle. Its spikes tend to coincide with economic stress: dot-com, 2008, COVID. In 2025, total layoffs rank as the seventh-highest since 1989, approaching levels typically associated with recessions.

Put together, the picture is fairly consistent. Job growth has stalled. New roles skew increasingly toward part-time, hourly, or gig work. Layoffs are running at levels usually seen in downturns. It’s a challenging environment.

Our annual review of the US marketing job market adds further nuance. More companies are hiring, but for fewer marketing roles. Teams are getting smaller, even as marketing activity spreads across a broader base of employers.

So where does that leave opportunity, especially for the marketing folks?

At INSEAD, I argued that the next wave of SaaS hiring won’t centre on engineers. As AI reduces the cost of building software, the real constraint shifts to go-to-market execution and narrative. Founding GTM talent - product marketers, growth leaders, marketing engineers and, yes, influential comms strategists - people who can make decisions, execute quickly, and build momentum before scaling teams.

The three roles we feature today reflect that shift. 1Mind, and Otter.ai are looking for marketers who can operate in the founding GTM seat, owning the story, the system, and the revenue line. Anthropic, meanwhile, needs a strategic comms master to own their three most important customer narratives, translating complex AI capabilities into compelling stories that resonate across internet culture.

*This job was initially posted 4 months ago and reposted a couple of weeks back.

Anthropic is a company that approaches AI as "Big Science" and a cohesive "empirical research effort" rather than just a software utility. If you’ve watched their recent run of ad video, you’ll know that they aren’t afraid to pop shots at the competition either. Their Super Bowl LX debut featured a series of pointed commercials mocking OpenAI’s decision to bring ads to ChatGPT. One spot, titled "BETRAYAL," dramatized a user seeking advice only to have the chatbot pivot into a pitch for a cougar-dating site, while another mocked the insertion of "height-boosting insole" ads for “short kings” mid-conversation. The definitive tagline "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" has already hit a nerve, inspiring a novella-length rant from Sam Altman, who labeled the campaign "dishonest" and "authoritarian." – he fell right into their trap.

As the new Head of Product Communications, your REAL Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is the Industrialization of Trust which is in our view, a war on three fronts..

The first front is the "Glass Box" Revolution. In an industry selling "Black Boxes," Anthropic is selling the Scientific Instrument. You must translate dense research on Interpretability and Multimodal Neurons into a commercial "Killer Feature." You need to convince developers that they should choose Claude not because it’s "nicer," but because it’s the only model where they can actually see the "gears" turning. The second front is the "Thinking Person’s AI." Anthropic is the choice for the Intellectual Vanguard. Your role is to make Epistemic Humility admitting what the model doesn't know cooler than the "fake it until you make it" culture of the competition. You are marketing to the power users who value a model's "Constitution" over its "Vibes." Finally, you must leverage the Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) status not as a moral high ground, but as a Business Guarantee. Frame Anthropic as the only partner structurally incapable of sacrificing safety for quarterly earnings. Despite what Sam said, you are selling the "Sovereign Alternative" to an increasingly "authoritarian" AI landscape.

This role reports to Christopher Nulty, the Head of External Communications, and knowing his background is the ultimate "cheat code" for candidates. Nulty spent a decade at Airbnb navigating existential regulatory combat and crisis communications for Brian Chesky. Before that, he led communications for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and cut his teeth in Washington's political trenches at the SEIU. A self-described "debate club nerd" who lives for researching and landing the winning argument, Nulty is looking for a "Strategic Litigator" who can partner with Mike Krieger (Chief Product Officer and Instagram co-founder) and Paul Smith (Chief Commercial Officer) to frame Claude as essential culture-shaping infrastructure. To win his room, you must abandon standard corporate gloss and show up with an unshakeable thesis that weaponizes safety research as a competitive weapon.

If Taligence were filling this seat, we would skip the general tech PR circuit and look for narrative architects from the product comms leads at Uber during their difficult “Travis” era, Meta fellows who launched Llama. We’d also look for talent from Cloudflare, the ultimate "Invisible Sovereign" infrastructure, or Palantir, specifically the operators who know how to sell "Deep Tech" to paranoid buyers in the CISO and National Security boardroom. On the agency side, we would look for veterans of Fenway Strategies (narrative architects), GMMB (Nulty’s alma mater and masters of issue advocacy), or Trident DMG (litigation PR). The offer will go to the leader who can survive the Human Authenticity Firewall by turning "Honest and Harmless" into a CFO-approved line item that justifies a $60B valuation and can withstand the pressure of a possible fast-track to IPO. The offer will go to the "High Agency" leader who survives the Human Authenticity Firewall,  who can collaborate with Claude to refine drafts but show up unmistakable and un-augmented during live assessments. They're offering $400K which underlines the seriousness of this endeavor.

If you thought the AI revolution was already at full tilt, 1mind is here to prove that the text box was just the warm‑up act; the next era of growth has a face and a voice.

Would you buy from a robot? That question drives 1mind’s mission to prove that sales may no longer need humans at all. The idea here is that they are deploying multimodal “Superhumans” designed to handle the menial, repetitive tasks of the entire sales cycle, from qualifying leads to negotiating term sheets.

As CMO, you are being hired to invent a category and you need both ambition and raw belief to do that. The JD is explicitly anti‑fluff and echoes what we see time and time over in early‑stage B2B SaaS patterns: they want a “hands‑on builder” who will personally lead the creation of foundational assets, from website copy to positioning decks, while defining a thesis that distinguishes them in a suffocatingly crowded sales‑tech space.

The role is a high‑stakes second act for Founder and CEO Amanda Kahlow, who spent over a decade building 6sense into a predictive intelligence powerhouse. While 6sense helped companies find buyers, 1mind’s technology, developed in a lab for 5 years, is built to actually close them.

Kahlow is building a “rocket‑ship” culture that is aggressively anti‑status‑quo; she is currently working with her board on a model to incentivize “Human Replacement”, not as dystopia but as a radical performance model rewarding automation and adaptability, where employees who manage to eliminate their own roles using AI are rewarded with forward‑vested equity and promoted to new challenges. The momentum is already measurable: 1mind’s agent reportedly drove a 25% increase in trial conversions for HubSpot.

The company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with $40 million in total funding, including a $30 million Series A led by Battery Ventures. This capital is fueling a workforce that has exploded to 98 employees, up a massive 219% year‑over‑year, primarily by poaching from high‑velocity infrastructure and content giants. 1mind is stacking its deck with generative‑AI natives from Typeface, talent from Kahlow’s former home at 6sense, and SaaS operators from Rippling and Pavilion. This is a calculated approach needed to bridge the gap between predictive intent and generative closing.

If Taligence had this search, we’d steer clear of traditional consumer‑tech marketers and hunt for operators who have survived “Category War One.” We’d be headhunting from the pioneers of multimodal synthesis: leaders from Synthesia or HeyGen who have already spent years educating the market on the value of photoreal AI video. We’d also look for Product Marketing leads from Gong or Chorus.ai who have spent years analyzing the “anatomy of a deal” and know exactly which human “pain points” a digital teammate needs to solve. Given the level of belief in the tool required for this, an interesting pick could be talent from the HubSpot growth team who have seen the “Superhuman” conversion data from the buyer’s perspective and know it works. A truly contrarian pick would be a “World‑Builder” from the AAA gaming industry: think a Narrative Director from Rockstar Games or Epic Games. Why? Because if the future of sales has a face, a voice, and a personality, the winner won’t be the one with the best slide deck, but the one who creates a character people actually want to talk to, and would buy from.

To win this seat, talk about the P&L. Talk about how you built something from scratch to replace a traditional human feat. Kahlow’s vision is to free humans from the “menial shuffling of papers” so they can return to being “heart‑centered.” Walk in with a plan that proves how “AI‑Led Growth” reduces human headcount while accelerating the pipeline to closed‑won. Reference her focus on the humility to ask, “What did I get wrong yesterday?” to signal you understand category creation is a difficult path laden with pitfalls. The leader who lands this role understands that this is about narrative control, clarity, speed, and conviction when everyone else is still guessing.

Otter.ai is currently in the middle of a classic scaling identity crisis: business professionals love them for transcription, but CIOs are still deciding if they are a "mission-critical platform" or a "security risk". With over 1 billion meetings transcribed and a fresh milestone of $100 million in ARR hit in late 2025, the company is hunting for a Director of Product Marketing to define the ICP and shape a positioning narrative that secures a permanent seat in the corporate tech stack. This is a hands-on, cross-functional mandate designed to turn meeting data into collaborative, actionable intelligence.

The culture at Otter is "scrappy and biased for action," prioritizing builders who can write, build, and ship foundational GTM assets independently. You are being hired to move the brand beyond its "prosumer utility" roots and into high-stakes enterprise enablement. The JD explicitly asks for someone who can "measure what matters," building the ROI dashboards that prove Otter is a productivity multiplier that shortens sales cycles and enhances cross-functional transparency.

If Taligence were filling this seat, we’d bypass the pure consumer tech crowd and look for "Workflow Artisans" from the productivity world. We’d hunt for Product Marketing leads from Loom or Canva who have navigated the "bottom-up" to "top-down" enterprise pivot. We’d also look for talent from Gong, Slack or Asana, specifically operators who have spent years convincing IT buyers that a "better way to communicate" is worth a seven-figure contract.

To win this interview, ditch the "efficiency" buzzwords and talk about "Accountable Insights". Reference Otter’s recent push into AI-driven summaries and HIPAA compliance to show how you would position these as the "single source of truth" for asynchronous teams. Signal that you intend to turn every transcribed meeting into a revenue-generating asset and walk in with a 90-day plan to align the Sales, Product, and Customer Success teams around a single, non-negotiable value proposition.

Here are a few options, depending on your appetite for a serious move right now: