The compliance layer of the AI hiring stack

Snapshot 2026-08-19 · 22,102 listings from 36 sources · CC BY 4.0

Of 6,349 live remote listings, 77.2% state no eligibility rule at all. Among the 1,445 that do, 59.8% (Wilson 95% CI 57.2–62.3) exclude candidates outside a named region. Listings tagged "worldwide" are barely different: 58.1% of those that state a rule still restrict it.

Why the number is a range, not one figure

A restriction can be written by the employer or imposed by the feed. Adzuna boards, for example, are single-country datasets, so a listing there is closed to outsiders whether or not the ad says so. We report all three counts rather than picking the most quotable one.

Where the restrictions point

Half of all restricted listings require one country. Meanwhile only 2.9% of remote listings name a time-zone requirement at all, so the constraint is jurisdictional rather than operational.

Advertised pay

46.2% of remote listings advertise pay. The median among them is $170,000 a year, skewed toward US technology roles. Split by eligibility: restricted listings $173,502 (n=465) against open listings $163,000 (n=229) — too close to claim as a real difference. The pay hypothesis from the July study did not reproduce.

Openness looks like a company property (exploratory)

The pre-registered test required 20 or more stated-rule listings per employer; only six clear that bar, so it is underpowered and we report it as a failure. At a threshold of 10 listings — exploratory, not pre-registered — 16 employers qualify, and 68.8% of them are open on one in ten or fewer of their listings.

Method

• Single cross-sectional read from production D1. No time-trend claims.
• Labels re-derived from current listing text, never read from the stored column.
• Classifier validated first on 120 hand-labelled rows: 90.9% precision and 87% recall on restricted listings, 100% on open ones.
• Re-derived labels agree with the production labels on 86.4% of rows; the gap is reported rather than hidden.
• Listings stating no eligibility rule are excluded from denominators rather than counted as open. Onsite roles are excluded.

Limitations we state up front: silence is not openness; text is not law (an employer can write “open to anyone” and still be unable to run payroll in your country); and one index is not the global labour market — our sources skew toward English-language technology employers.