Long-time readers will know that we work with our labour market data partner, Aspen Technology Labs, to keep a close eye on hiring trends for in-house marketing professionals across the U.S.

Aspen Tech Labs tracks more than 10 million live jobs every day, sourced from over 300,000 employer career sites. And the latest data gives us a useful snapshot of where the market stood in August.

Their monthly report, published earlier this week, shows that U.S. job postings climbed to 6.63 million in August, the highest level since June 2025. Despite continued economic and geopolitical uncertainty, the broader jobs market appears to be extending the recovery that began in February, following the dip we saw in December.

For marketing professionals, the picture looks stronger still.

This week, we’re tracking 37,634 live marketing jobs across the U.S., up 11.7% year over year. Of those, 5,241 are Director-level and above, what we classify as senior marketing roles, and that segment has risen an impressive 21% from a year ago.

Pay transparency is improving, too. Some 58.8% of current marketing job postings include salary information. The median advertised salary for senior marketing roles is now $156,002, compared with $94,640 across marketing roles at all levels.

Looking at the hierarchy, the current median salaries break down as follows:

In short, the broader U.S. hiring market is showing signs of recovery, but senior marketing appears to be moving considerably faster.

This week’s CMO Ladder spans a $4 billion outdoor brand that’s growing nicely while its leadership churns, a San Francisco university that wants a revenue-driving marketer on a discount budget, and a rideshare company stitching together a global empire just as the cars start driving themselves.

Regular CMO Ladder readers may think we’re obsessed with VF Corp. We’re not. They just keep handing us material. In January last year we covered their Dickies CMO search; by that summer we were back for Vans after another 22% quarterly revenue drop. We even emailed the CEO to offer help. He didn’t write back.

Now VF is hiring a CMO for The North Face.

This time, there's an important difference. The North Face is doing rather well.

The brand passed $4 billion in annual revenue in FY26, growing 8% reported and 5% in constant currency. Its final quarter was stronger again, up 12%, including 17% growth in the Americas. The momentum continued into Q1 FY27, with another 6% reported increase and growth across every region. VF actually cited better-than-expected performance at The North Face when it raised its full-year revenue guidance in July.

The issue with this job appears to be inside the building.

CEO Bracken Darrell has been unusually candid about that. When he brought Caroline Brown in as Global Brand President in 2024, he later said The North Face had suffered from “political challenges,” internal “strife,” and dreadful morale. She left in March 2026, with Darrell saying she’d done a “super job” and the business was now in good shape. Chris Goble, previously President of Dickies and then VF’s Emerging Brands portfolio, took over.

Marketing has been moving around too.

When Dennis Seydel became CMO in January 2025, CMO Ladder gave the appointment an enthusiastic nod. After 17 years at Nike and senior roles at Google and Uber, we called him well suited to a brand sitting at the intersection of culture, innovation and brand building.

We watched.

Seydel was still publicly identified as The North Face CMO this May, announcing an 8-year partnership with U.S. Ski & Snowboard. Four months later, VF is advertising his job.

There may be a perfectly ordinary explanation. We don’t know, and we’re not going to invent one. But combined with Caroline Brown’s departure this spring, it’s another senior leadership change at a brand whose CEO has already acknowledged internal politics, strife, and dreadful morale.

Then you read the job description.

As the new CMO, you must: create one unified global brand marketing strategy; establish governance and decision-making; balance centralized control with regional autonomy; improve accountability and strengthen the marketing leadership bench; embed data and AI; improve MROI; build better ways of working between global and regional teams.

Quite a shopping list for a $4 billion brand whose sales are already growing.

It also sounds remarkably similar to the job Darrell has been doing across VF. His turnaround has involved stripping costs, selling Supreme and Dickies, reducing debt, replacing senior leaders and introducing “The VF Way,” a standardized operating model intended to improve how the individual brands work. VF’s latest proxy describes the management team as having been comprehensively reset, including new Presidents at The North Face, Vans and Timberland.

So take this job, and you’ll enter a company 3 years into a simplification drive, running marketing for a brand whose internal machinery has already required serious repair. There’s plenty to market, though. The North Face has spent the past year firing cultural ammunition in almost every direction. In Q3, VF specifically credited product elevation and social-first marketing with broadening the brand’s reach.

There’s fuel in this tank. VF spent $849 million on advertising and promotion last year, around 9% of group revenue, and says it uses marketing science to optimize return on that investment.

All in all, a fascinating CMO assignment. The brand already has fame, growth, athletes, products, collaborations, retail theatre and a parent company willing to spend heavily on marketing. You’ll need to turn all of that activity into one easy-to-operate global machine without flattening the local markets that sell the stuff.

Then there’s the sheer number of things The North Face has to be at once. It needs technical credibility with somebody halfway up a mountain, fashion credibility with somebody wearing a puffer jacket in Brooklyn, enough premium stretch to sell four-figure leather, and relevance beyond the months when everybody is cold.

If Taligence had the brief, I’d look for someone who’s already run a genuinely complicated global consumer organization - not a pure brand-builder, and not a pure operator, more of a translator.

Think of the profiles that have succeeded in similar roles: a Nike or Adidas global brand lead who has managed EMEA or Greater China as a region, not just marketed to it; a tech-platform marketer from Google or Meta who understands how to build measurement infrastructure across fragmented markets. Or an outdoor-industry insider from Arc’teryx or Patagonia who already speaks the language of technical credibility and community. The strongest candidate would combine two of those three.

What VF should avoid is a pure creative who will produce beautiful campaigns that never scale, or a pure commercial operator who will squeeze MROI until the brand loses its soul. The JD keeps returning to governance, regional influence, commercial accountability and operating models for a reason. VF appears to have plenty of creative firepower. The winning candidate needs to make the international machinery work.

For calibration, there are adjacent jobs with pieces of this brief. Arc’teryx offers the technical credibility and community challenge. Patagonia brings unusually strong purpose constraints. Columbia brings scale and portfolio complexity. The North Face combines all of that with a $4 billion brand, multiple regions, substantial marketing investment and unusually visible leadership churn.

We have spent nearly 2 years watching VF rotate execs, sell brands, cut costs and rebuild marketing leadership across the portfolio. The North Face is an awkward chapter because the commercial numbers look good.

Now Darrell gets to find out whether a healthy brand can finally become an easy company to run. I’m emailing him again. If you want the job, perhaps you should too.

If being obsessed with VF Corp wasn’t enough of a confession, 2026 has given us a side hustle: covering university CMO roles.

The cool bit is that enough time has passed to see who landed the job.

When University of Maryland Global Campus advertised a $450,000-$480,000 Chief Marketing & Enrollment Officer, we wrote that “enrollment” was polite-speak for sales and said they needed somebody who understood funnels, economics and accountability. They recruited Daron Rodriguez, a career enrollment operator whose background includes West Coast University, Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and Kaplan.

At RPI, we argued that its first CMO needed serious commercial brand experience. They hired Dana Bodine, formerly of Trustpilot, Mastercard, Apple, Time and The New York Times.

For eCornell, we recommended a product-minded commercial marketer rather than another university lifer. They hired Emily Hoffman, whose résumé includes General Mills, J&J, BlackRock and Nestlé.

Then FIT advertised its first CMO. We told them to look outside the usual university circuit for somebody steeped in fashion and culture. Last month they hired Kimberly Fasting-Berg, formerly CMO of WME Fashion and Kravet, after more than a decade at Condé Nast.

We try not to be smug here.

Now the University of San Francisco is hiring a CMO, and the brief shows the same theme we have been watching across higher education. Marketing is being pulled closer to enrollment, revenue and operating decisions.

USF would like to do it for a lot less money: $180,000-$225,000.

UMGC went to $480K. RPI offered $350K. NYU recently advertised senior enrollment marketing leadership at up to $485K.

And this is not exactly a low-cost posting. USF’s Hilltop campus sits in Inner Richmond, where a one-bedroom runs about $3,500 a month. Cross toward Lone Mountain and you’re closer to $3,800. Fancy buying instead? Typical home values around the campus run roughly $1.6 million to $2 million.

Welcome to San Francisco.

In the JD USF calls this a role with a “changed focus” and gives the CMO authority over marketing priorities. Brand, demand generation and lifecycle marketing are expected to produce measurable enrollment and revenue.

You will oversee Strategy, Creative, Web & Digital, Content and Marketing Operations, build a 3-year roadmap, create GTM plans for individual schools and establish a proper intake and prioritization system.

Then comes my favorite part.

USF wants to replace measures such as requester satisfaction and turnaround time with lead volume, lead quality, CPL and cost per enrolled student.

Anyone who has worked inside a decentralized organization can picture what came before. Every Dean has a priority, every school has a campaign, and everything is urgent. There is a good reason. President Salvador Aceves has said enrollment is the university’s main focus. This year’s incoming class beat target, but the 2023, 2024 and 2025 cohorts all fell below USF’s enrollment goal, while net tuition revenue from each remains below the university’s $45 million-$50 million target. With undergraduate tuition at $63,880 and total direct on-campus costs above $83,000, every missing student has a very visible financial value.

Suddenly “cost per enrolled student” sounds less academic.

We have watched this progression for more than a year. RPI put marketing in the President’s cabinet. eCornell attached a direct revenue mandate. UMGC combined Marketing and Enrollment into one executive role. NYU built an enrollment operation around predictive modeling, yield optimization and financial-aid economics.

There is another complication that the CMO cannot control. Around one in ten USF students is international, and the university wants that population to grow. The Trump administration has spent 2026 making the American study-to-work pathway more expensive, more precarious and much harder to plan around.

Student visas now come with tighter time limits. Some CPT internships have been restricted. The administration has proposed a $103,265 fee for new H-1B visas, and this week proposed removing the 60-day grace period that gives sponsored workers time to find another employer after losing a job.

That creates a brutal marketing problem for USF’s future CMO. You are asking an international family to spend close to six figures a year partly because San Francisco offers access to one of the world’s great technology and business markets. Four years later, the student may discover that remaining in that market depends on an immigration system whose rules, costs and tolerances keep changing.

For the international student USF wants to recruit, the American Dream has become a much harder product to sell. No amount of funnel optimization fixes that.

If Taligence had the brief, I would look beyond conventional university marketing again, but I would not go as far outside the category as we did for FIT or RPI.

USF needs someone who understands acquisition and lifecycle economics, but who has also survived a decentralized organization. Healthcare, membership businesses, charities and commercially run education companies could all produce interesting candidates who might even be within budget.

Which brings us back to the salary.

USF wants 10+ years of experience, a master’s degree, broad functional leadership, organizational redesign, enrollment accountability and enough stakeholder juggling to impose priorities across an entire university.

The ceiling is $225,000, which feels too light after watching what comparable institutions have been willing to pay.

And our little university CMO experiment is starting to reveal a pattern: institutions keep saying they want commercially minded marketers…. and then they actually go and recruit them.

USF has written the revenue number on this chair. Now it has to see whether $225K buys the person qualified to sit in it.

More than a decade ago, Lyft was literally advertising itself as the cheerful rebel fighting a sinister, black-suited Uber stand-in called ‘Ride Corp’. In a video they made, the villains sit in a dark boardroom plotting against happy Lyft drivers.

Ten years later, Lyft is buying companies across Europe and trying to assemble its own global mobility empire, sans the Travis caricateurs.

(The aforementioned videos are made private on YT; otherwise, I’d have shared them with you, as they were fun. Corporate adolescence is so fleeting….)

Last year Lyft bought Freenow, taking Lyft into 9 EU countries and more than 180 cities, then acquired TBR Global Chauffeuring, which operates across 120 countries and more than 3,000 cities. It has since added Gett's UK business and is stitching together rideshare, taxis, premium cars and partner networks.

Massive new complexity for this brief to tackle. Let’s begin…

The mandate covers global strategy, acquisition, vertical GTM, pipeline measurement, martech and the unglamorous question of how all these different businesses should play together. Naturally, Lyft wants one source of truth for acquisition, spend and lifetime value, plus clearer rules around how decisions get made.

That last bit caught my attention.

I spent a year at ride-hailing super-app Grab while it was scaling across Southeast Asia, and regional growth creates a particular kind of organizational headache. HQ wants consistency because consistency is efficient. Local teams know that customers, regulators, commercial realities, driver behavior and cultural norms skew differently in different markets. If you’ve done global or regional roles, you’ll know It’s never easy deciding which differences matter most and which are merely local teams bugging out.

Lyft now has that problem across a much wider collection of markets and acquired businesses.

And as the song says, the times are a-changing. American tech companies receive much less benefit of the doubt overseas than they once did, particularly in Europe. Freenow comes with established relationships with taxi fleets, unions, cities and regulators, and Lyft has been careful to emphasize that local infrastructure rather than importing the US rideshare playbook.

So what’s the job? Standardize the tech stack, data, measurement and enterprise proposition where it makes sense. Leave enough room for the local business to remain useful in the market that made it successful.

Lyft is targeting healthcare and non-emergency medical transportation, automotive, universities, hospitality, events, transit and business travel. Getting the PowerPoint to describe that as one proposition is a piece of cake. Getting the systems underneath it to behave like one company is the real job.

My recent trip to Shenzhen included a driverless ride, and this left me with another question for a future Lyft employee. What about….autonomous vehicles?

What happens to Lyft's bargaining power if the car no longer needs a Lyft driver? Waymo can reach consumers directly. Other AV owners may decide they would rather own the customer relationship. Lyft therefore needs value beyond access to a large pool of human drivers.

That makes the B2B build even more interesting. Enterprise relationships, payments, billing, compliance, healthcare integrations and global account management could all become reasons for customers to stay with Lyft even if the driver is out of the picture.

If Taligence had this brief, I would prioritize ridiculously technical people who have already dealt with several layers of complexity at once: global B2B growth, local-market politics, acquired businesses and genuinely messy systems. Uber and Grab are obvious pools, but travel platforms such as Booking Holdings or Expedia, American Express Global Business Travel and large logistics businesses could produce stronger surprises. An agency-network operator from WPP or Publicis could be an excellent wildcard, particularly someone who has integrated matrixed teams and platforms across regions and acquisitions. They are used to getting things done through influence vs direct authority.

Speaking of which, what’s the real authority behind the job at SD level? The JD repeatedly talks about influence, dotted lines, unification and creating a source of truth. Those words often appear when somebody is being asked to impose standards on teams they do not actually manage.

So ask - who owns the regional marketers? Ask who controls the budget. Ask whether you can choose the technology stack or merely suggest one. Most importantly, ask what happens when an acquired business says no.

At $220K-$270K plus bonus and equity, Lyft is paying well for a Senior Director. It should.

You are helping turn a collection of mobility businesses into one global commercial platform while the technology underneath the entire industry is beginning to change.

The strategy will fit on a slide. Getting everyone to use it is the job. Whether Lyft has given this role the authority to do that is the question the interview should answer!

Remember we are not the employer, nor agents of the employer but we have a knack for spotting the confessions. ^{Here’s our disclaimer}. See you next time.