Content marketers made up 0.8% of all new hires by the end of 2023, according to compensation data from Pave. Now, they're under 0.3% of new hires, representing a two-thirds drop over two and a half years, with every quarter since 2024 coming in lower than the one before it.

Pave

Despite hiring being down, companies hiring experienced content marketers are paying them about 21% more than the people already in the role. This trend isn't just for content marketers. HR generalist, for example, is the third coldest job in Pave's Hot Jobs Index, but there's a 10.3% premium for senior talent.

Across all job families, the baseline salary increase for a new hire is around 5.4% relative to an existing employee. The reliable raise comes from leaving, not staying—though that can scale significantly based on the type of job.

Does that mean shrinking jobs pay more?

It is a common belief that new hires always make more than tenured employees. The reason is that someone hired four years ago was priced at the market of four years ago and has probably been getting small annual increases ever since, whereas someone hired last month was priced at the higher rates of today's market.

To explore this, Pave plotted every job family across two axes: how much its share of hiring moved over the past year and what its new hires cost relative to incumbents. The results show a tight vertical column at the center. Almost every job family sits above 100%, meaning new hires cost more than incumbents no matter which way hiring moves.

Pave

In other words, it’s not just a trend in shrinking jobs. Functions that grew and functions that shrank landed in the same place. Customer service has cooled harder than any other job family in the dataset, and its new hires come in below parity. Customer success has also cooled, but its new hires cost almost 10% more than incumbents. Software engineering is hiring far more than both, and its new hires cost less of a premium than customer success.

The going rate doesn't seem to know which way demand is moving.

It’s not just how many, it’s which levels

While companies are reducing hiring across certain jobs like content marketing or HR generalist, these jobs aren't getting replaced completely. Companies are still actively hiring for these roles and paying them at a similar or higher benchmark than before.

Hiring volume isn't the only variable. Level matters as well, with entry-level workers having significantly reduced across the broader dataset. Workers aged 21 to 25 fell from 14.9% of the workforce at public companies in early 2023 to around 6.5% by mid-2025.

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So why doesn’t pay ever fall?

When looking at all of the companies in the dataset, though demand for different roles has varied over time, pay as a whole almost always goes up. Economists call it downward nominal wage rigidity (i.e., "sticky down" wages). Regardless of other economic conditions, pay is almost always adjusted up.

Pave

Economist Truman Bewley spent a recession asking employers why they laid people off instead of cutting pay, and the answer was almost always morale. A pay cut poisons everyone who stays. So employees at companies mostly only see their pay increasing, or staying the same at the very least. When those same employees are looking for employment elsewhere, they will likely only accept a salary close to that of their previous role, ultimately continuing the inflationary impact of salary.

Despite the market turmoil, hiring changes for various roles, and the threat of AI-related disruption, pay has consistently moved in an upward direction.

What this means if you have one of these jobs

Your job cooling off is not the same as your pay cooling off. A job can lose two-thirds of its hiring and still cost more to fill than it did before, so what actually changes in a cold market is the number of opportunities that are available, not the price behind them.

Pay is a lagging indicator that looks like a live one. It jumps when the market heats up and refuses to fall when it cools. This is why there's still a premium to be had when moving roles rather than staying in one. If you're looking at a salary benchmark today, it's built from the people sitting in those seats today, and they were all priced on the way up.

This story was produced by Pave and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.