Why I Built the Mobility Jobs Board, and Where the Next Wave Is

It is a Tuesday morning in Michigan. A senior powertrain engineer who spent eleven years putting battery packs into passenger vehicles is in her sixth week of looking. Her program got cut in the spring. She has applied to thirty-one roles, nearly all of them at companies with a car somewhere in the name, because that is what she knows and that is where she has always worked. Two rejections, twenty-nine silences.

That same morning, two thousand miles away, a hiring manager at a launch vehicle company in El Segundo is looking at a requisition that has been open since June. Thermal systems. He needs someone who has run a qualification campaign on hardware that fails loudly, who has argued with suppliers about tolerances, who has shipped something real against a date that would not move. He has reviewed a hundred and forty applications. He has passed on almost all of them for the same reason, written in his notes over and over: no aerospace background.

Those two people need each other. Neither one knows the other exists. I built the Mobility Jobs board because I got tired of watching that happen, and because after fifteen years and more than a thousand hires in this industry, I could no longer tell candidates what I thought was true. I wanted to count it.

From the candidate's chair

When your program gets cut, the market does not look like it moved. It looks like it died. Every signal you have access to is a signal of absence: the silence after an application, the recruiter who stops replying, the post from someone in your old group who is also looking. You extrapolate from the silence, and the conclusion you reach is that nobody is hiring.

Here is the part that is hard to see from that chair. You are almost certainly searching by industry noun rather than by what you can actually do. You type EV. You check the five companies whose products you would recognize in a parking lot. Those are exactly the companies every other person from your program is checking, on the same morning, with a resume that reads a lot like yours.

The board says something different. As I write this there are 12,637 open roles across 97 companies and 15 verticals, pulled straight from those companies' own career systems. EV is 1,585 of them, about twelve percent. Aerospace by itself is 6,552, more than four times the entire EV count. If you have been searching the twelve percent and concluding the market is dead, you have been reading a real number and drawing the wrong lesson from it. Look at the whole board and the shape of it changes.

From the hiring team's chair

The manager in El Segundo is not lazy and he is not being unreasonable. He has one requisition, a program milestone that is already tight, and a director asking every two weeks why the role is still open. Screening a hundred and forty applications is not a research project for him. It is a thing he does between reviews, and he needs a rule that lets him move fast.

So he uses the rule everyone uses: has this person done this industry before. It feels like a proxy for competence, and occasionally it is. Most of the time it is a proxy for nothing more than where someone happened to work. When he writes no aerospace background, the question he actually meant to ask was whether she has run a qualification campaign on hardware that fails loudly. She has. Eleven years of it. The word aerospace was just never going to appear on her resume.

What he cannot see from his chair is how fast his competition is growing. In the last seven days the board added 1,271 new roles, and 588 of those were aerospace. His local talent pool did not grow by 588 people last week. It did not grow at all. He is also fishing in a smaller pond than he thinks: only 361 of the 12,637 roles on the board are remote, under three percent, because this industry builds physical things in specific buildings. Everyone in his zip code who has done exactly his job is already employed, probably by the company across the street, and is getting the same three messages he is sending.

Where it breaks

Both of them are using the same broken key. She filters by industry to decide where to apply. He filters by industry to decide whom to read. The filter is identical, it runs in opposite directions, and it is why a qualified person and an open role can sit four weeks apart without ever touching.

The numbers make the cost of that filter concrete. Group the verticals that are genuinely ascending right now, aerospace, drones and uncrewed systems, robotics and physical AI, eVTOL, electric marine, and autonomous delivery, and you get 8,863 open roles, just over 70 percent of the entire board. That is 5.6 times the EV count. Two companies alone, SpaceX at 2,419 roles and Anduril at 2,168, have more open positions between them than all of EV put together. Behind them: Shield AI at 491, Zipline at 342, Relativity Space at 328, Waymo at 323, K2 Space at 230, Saronic at 204, Joby at 203.

Read that list again and notice what it is. It is a new space race, a defense budget that got large and stayed large, boats that pilot themselves, trucks that deliver without a cab (Einride and Lidl put one on German roads this month), and aircraft that take off vertically. The new wave of mobility is not the passenger car. It stopped being the passenger car a while ago.

Now ask what those companies actually need. They need people who can take a prototype to volume, who have survived a launch, who know what a supplier says versus what a supplier does, who have scaled a team while the product was still changing underneath them. That is not an aerospace skill set. That is precisely the skill set of the people currently being laid off from passenger EV programs, who learned it the hard way over the last decade. I wrote a companion piece on which EV skills map to which ascending vertical, role by role, if you want the translation rather than the argument.

What to do differently

If you're the candidate

• Search by verb, not by industry noun. You did thermal validation, supplier qualification, launch readiness. Search those words across all 15 verticals instead of typing EV and stopping.
• Apply into the ascending seventy percent. Aerospace, drones, robotics, eVTOL, marine and delivery are where the roles are. Give them half your applications this week and see what changes.
• Translate your resume once, at the top. Two lines naming what you shipped, at what volume, against what deadline, will get read by a manager who would otherwise have filtered you on industry.
• Assume your target list is the problem before you assume your resume is. Six weeks of silence against thirty-one applications into one vertical is a targeting result, not a verdict on you.

If you're the hiring team

• Write down what the industry keyword is standing in for. If it means qualification campaigns and supplier escalations, screen for those directly and your candidate pool gets several times larger overnight.
• Go look at who just got laid off in passenger EV. Those people have scaling scars you cannot hire locally, and right now they are available and being ignored by everyone using your filter.
• Stop competing only inside your zip code. Under three percent of these roles are remote, which means relocation is the lever, and someone who has already moved for a program once will move again for the right one.
• Track how many roles your competitors opened this month, not just how many you have open. Aerospace added 588 roles in seven days. That is the market you are actually bidding against.

The engineer in Michigan is qualified for the role in El Segundo. She has been qualified for it the entire time she has been applying somewhere else. The manager has been passing on people like her for three months while his program date got closer. Nothing about that is a talent shortage, and nothing about it is a dead market. It is two people reading a map that only shows one road. I count the roles every morning and publish the whole map, free and without a signup, so that both of them can stop guessing. That is the whole reason this thing exists.