Australia’s media and events sector has had its best quarter of hiring activity for three years after four quarters of negative growth, according to research by Mercury Talent.
Hiring activity across the sector was up by 11 per cent, but the headline figure only tells part of the story.
The industry is going through a ‘K-shaped’ recovery, where some sectors are growing rapidly, but many others are in decline.
Hiring for large scale events—primarily driven by the Rugby World Cup, Tennis Australia and newcomer Fever—increased by 267 per cent for the September quarter year-on-year.
Out-of-home & retail media (up 31 per cent), B2B media/events (20 per cent) and radio/podcast (10 per cent) also posted solid gains.
Nonetheless, search/social (down 14 per cent), TV/streaming (-14 per cent) and programmatic (-28 per cent) were all down, while hiring activity in the publishing industry was flat for the quarter.
Activity by job function
A persistent weakness in sales/client service hiring has continued for a sixth straight quarter. Media sales roles were down 9 per cent year-on-year, with traditional publishers and broadcasters are leading the pullback.
However, Google (up 55 per cent) and REA Group (+180 per cent) are growing their sales teams.
On a positive note, marketing and communications roles were up by 68 per cent, albeit after a 2025 in which many marketing and communications teams were cut back.
Randles told B&T this is due to very low levels of marketing hiring in 2025, new entrants into the marketing talent market (Fever, Rugby World Cup, Netball World Cup, ICC World Cup) and certain companies (Domain, TikTok, REA, Foxtel) increasing their hiring activity for marketing jobs.
Product and operations hiring grew 12 per cent for the sixth consecutive positive quarter.
Greenshoots, but not recovery
“The job market in the media and events industry has been up and down over the past three years so I’m loath to call this result a recovery,” said Justin Randles, director at Mercury Talent.
“That said, 1,166 jobs for the quarter is the best news for jobseekers since July-September 2024 so we’re all hoping the bounce we’re experiencing will continue.”
Hiring for mid-level roles grew 25 per cent year-on-year, the strongest seniority result on record, while junior-level hiring recovered modestly at +3.2 per cent. The data suggests organisations are rebuilding from the middle out, moving beyond cautious replacement hiring into genuine workforce expansion.
Roles with ‘AI’ in the job title reached 24 in Q3 2026, the highest quarterly total on record and 140 per cent above Q3 2025.
Nine, News Corp, Google and TikTok are the most active hirers, but the Q3 2026 cohort includes director-level AI appointments at News Corp and AI enablement managers at Tennis Australia and Livewire, a signal that AI capability is being embedded at a strategic level across the industry, not just within technology teams.
