The short answer
Across 589 US Keyword Planner terms, searches by people looking for technology jobs and salaries outnumber employer hiring searches 33 to 1 (86,400 against 2,650 a month). The largest platform-specific hiring query, hire mongodb developer, reaches 70 a month. Employer demand sits in generic staffing terms.
Hiring for this? See how Conntal handles IT staffing
A reasonable assumption when building a niche technology staffing firm is that buyers search for the technology: hire a Kafka engineer, RabbitMQ contractor, Cloudera developer. We checked against 589 Google Keyword Planner terms, because the assumption decides where a site's content should go, and for the most part it is wrong.
Headline: job-seekers search 33 times more than employers
33 to 1
Monthly searches by job-seekers (86,400) against employer hiring searches (2,650), across the 286 keywords that name a technology or role
Searches that name a technology are overwhelmingly from people looking for work or pay, not from people hiring. The same split for the narrower set of niche platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ServiceNow, Snowflake, MuleSoft, IBM MQ, Kubernetes and similar) is 9,870 job-seeker searches against 430 employer searches, about 23 to 1.
| Technology or role | Employer searches a month | Job-seeker searches a month | Job-seeker searches per employer search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data engineering | 450 | 25,190 | 56 |
| Site reliability engineering | 20 | 24,080 | 1,204 |
| DevOps | 420 | 10,320 | 25 |
| ServiceNow | 120 | 6,620 | 55 |
| Cloud | 350 | 6,310 | 18 |
| Enterprise architecture | 20 | 4,080 | 204 |
| Snowflake | 30 | 1,230 | 41 |
| MuleSoft | 30 | 540 | 18 |
| Kubernetes | 70 | 400 | 6 |
| Kafka | 20 | 190 | 9.5 |
| RabbitMQ | 10 | 10 | 1 |
| AWS | 480 | 320 | 0.7 |
Finding 2: platform-specific hiring queries stay tiny
No query that pairs a niche platform with hiring intent reaches 100 searches a month; the largest is 70. A page titled Hire Kafka Engineers is therefore a landing page for buyers you have already reached, not an organic traffic play.
| Keyword | Monthly searches |
|---|---|
| hire mongodb developer | 70 |
| servicenow recruiter | 40 |
| hire elasticsearch developer | 40 |
| hire kubernetes developer | 40 |
| hire snowflake developer | 30 |
| hire servicenow developer | 30 |
| hire mulesoft developer | 30 |
Finding 3: employer demand is in generic staffing terms
The searches buyers actually run are generic: staffing agency, staff augmentation, contract to hire. Several carry top-of-page bids above $40, which shows what a click is worth to whoever is buying it.
| Keyword | Monthly searches | Top-of-page bid (low to high) |
|---|---|---|
| it staffing agency | 2,900 | $3.61 to $20.00 |
| tech staffing agency | 1,900 | $3.80 to $25.00 |
| staff augmentation | 1,900 | $8.44 to $63.29 |
| contract to hire | 1,300 | $5.09 to $44.25 |
| direct hire | 1,000 | $0.72 to $9.00 |
| it staff augmentation services | 480 | $9.23 to $30.00 |
| it staff augmentation | 320 | $13.19 to $70.43 |
| staff augmentation vs managed services | 260 | $6.96 to $16.58 |
| cloud staffing | 210 | $4.08 to $39.28 |
| contract staffing agency | 210 | $1.97 to $9.55 |
Finding 4: a summer 2026 jump that we discount
In July to September 2026, 14 keywords that reached 40 or more monthly searches in that period ran at least 2.5 times above their October 2025 to June 2026 median, together rising from 1,660 to 5,351 searches a month. The rest of the dataset did not move: the total for the last three months averaged 184,681 a month against a 194,080 median, so the rise is concentrated in a few terms.
| Keyword | Median, Oct 2025 to Jun 2026 | Average, Jul to Sep 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| direct hire | 1,000 | 2,733 |
| data engineering services | 320 | 926 |
| direct hire recruiting services | 20 | 330 |
| enterprise architect consulting | 110 | 323 |
| how to hire remote developers | 30 | 283 |
What we changed because of it
- 01Role pages stay, but they are positioned as proof of the vetting standard rather than as organic traffic plays. They publish the actual screen; that is their job.
- 02The commercial weight sits on the rates, staff augmentation, contract-to-hire and staffing agency pages, which target where employer demand measurably is.
- 03Technology-specific content is written for engineers rather than buyers, because that is who the search volume represents, and a staffing firm needs supply as much as demand.
Method
- Source: Google Ads Keyword Planner, United States (location 2840), English, retrieved 30 October 2026. Ten generic staffing seeds, twelve role seeds and three competitor URLs produced about 1,780 distinct keywords.
- 589 were kept after relevance filtering. Dropped: local and temporary agency queries, healthcare and mechanical staffing, geo-modified agency queries, recruiting-software terms, general software-engineer jobs and AI or data-science hiring.
- Volume is the median of the nine months October 2025 to June 2026. July to September 2026 is kept separately as the last-three-month average.
- Intent labels were assigned by pattern and spot-checked: hire, cost, compare, job-seeker, interview, job description, informational and consulting. Employer searches here means hire, cost and compare.
- Planner groups close variants, so summing rows can double count by roughly 5 percent. Every figure is reported as returned.
Ready to engage?
See how Conntal handles IT staffing, with every engineer screened by a practitioner before you see a CV.
Sources
- [1] Google Ads Keyword Planner, Keyword volume and top-of-page bid data, United States, English, 589 keywords. Retrieved 30 October 2026.Primary source
Related questions
Do people search for specific technologies when hiring engineers?
Rarely. Across 589 Keyword Planner terms, the largest platform-specific hiring query is hire mongodb developer at 70 searches a month, and most are 10 to 40. Searches that name a technology come from job-seekers about 33 times as often as from employers.
How many job-seeker searches are there per employer search?
Across the 286 keywords that name a technology or role, 86,400 monthly searches are job-seeker intent against 2,650 employer intent, about 33 to 1. For niche platforms alone it is about 23 to 1, from 9,870 against 430.
Did hiring searches rise in summer 2026?
A few terms did. 14 keywords that reached 40 or more monthly searches ran at least 2.5 times above their October 2025 to June 2026 median in July to September 2026, but the dataset as a whole did not rise. We treat the jump as unverified and exclude it from planning.