In my job, I have a unique vantage point on how work is changing. Every day, we see millions of hiring decisions reflected in labor market data.
One trend stands out: according to our research division, the Indeed Hiring Lab, marketing job postings remain roughly 25% below pre-COVID-pandemic levels. In fact, marketing job opportunities have fallen faster than almost any other white-collar function over the last five years.
If you looked at that data in isolation, you might conclude marketing roles are becoming obsolete. I don’t think that’s what’s happening at all. Our data also shows that despite the broader trend, marketing job postings mentioning AI are actually increasing.
What’s changing isn’t the importance of marketing. It’s the type of marketer companies need.
Business know-how and data literacy are skills that companies need
More than ever, a modern marketing organization acts as a unified engine for sustainable business growth. Customers engage with brands across increasingly more channels, competition for attention continues to intensify, and artificial intelligence is reshaping how we create, distribute, and measure marketing.
Today, when everyone has access to the same AI tools, execution is no longer the sole differentiator: human judgment is. The modern marketer is shifting from a single-track functional specialist into a versatile, business-literate leader, and needs a completely different toolkit of skills.
When we’re building a marketing team, we’re looking for three capabilities:
- Data savvy. We’re getting billions of data points thrown at us daily. Access to that data isn’t the advantage; knowing how to separate the real signal from surface noise is.
- Business literacy. The best marketers understand far more than marketing. They can connect customer insight, product strategy, finance, and sales, and work backward from the business outcome rather than forward from the tactic.
- Curiosity and courage. This one’s more a personality trait than a skill, but it’s the one I screen for the hardest. We look for marketers who are willing to test, fail, and ditch playbooks that worked before — and learn.
Together, these might mean being willing to challenge past marketing practices, or refusing to delegate the strategic judgment that only your team can provide.
Own your data. Don’t outsource your judgment
This evolution in capability directly reshapes how a modern marketing organization must handle its operational intelligence. As AI increases the sheer volume of information available, it’s more critical than ever to have internal teams with the business context to ask the right questions.
Here’s a belief I hold that might ruffle some feathers: you cannot outsource the interpretation of your own data.
There is real value in outside expertise, but no third party can understand your business, customers, and strategy as well as your team does. Even the best external partners optimize for what they can see. They can’t fully comprehend what your business actually values, which customers you’re trying to reach, or which tradeoffs make sense for your strategy. That knowledge lives inside your team.
That’s why we made the call to bring our marketing analytics and data science capabilities in-house.
External agencies gave us a strong starting point, but taking full control of our marketing mix models allowed us to apply our own deeper business context. As our company evolved, we identified legacy channels that were no longer driving meaningful customer growth. Left unchecked, those kinds of disconnects can lead to expensive decisions.
Data should inform decisions. It should not replace human judgment, taste, or creative risk-taking. This distinction will only become more important.
The advantage will not come from having more dashboards or more data points. It will come from having people who can separate signal from noise and know what questions to ask next.
A challenge for marketing leaders
For my fellow marketing leaders, this evolution demands a different kind of leadership.
Consumer behavior has changed. Media has changed. AI is changing how people discover information and make decisions.
We must build the courage to break our own systems and challenge our own assumptions. The playbooks that served us a few years ago won’t necessarily produce the right outcomes today. We must treat marketing less as a collection of best practices and more as a science, while fostering a culture that encourages creative experimentation.
That’s what I believe the hiring data is really telling us. Companies aren’t hiring fewer marketers because marketing matters less. They’re hiring differently because the role itself is changing. The future won’t belong to marketers who simply know how to run yesterday’s playbook. It will belong to those with the judgment to evolve, take risks, and be bold.
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