Netflix Beefs Up Hiring for Live Entertainment Push

In a bid to mitigate risks posed by guild strikes that racked the streaming industry last year, Netflix is making aggressive grabs for more unscripted content—with a recent emphasis on live sports.

Netflix has evolved from a mail-order DVD rental shop to the Titan of the streaming world, with a ~$17 billion annual budget for original content. As the Streaming Wars wage on for the largest possible share of the world’s attention—remember when Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings claimed the platform’s biggest competitor is sleep?—expensive and risky original programming is losing its Golden Boy status fast.

Last month, Netflix and WWE parent TKO announced that RAW, WWE’s flagship weekly wrestling program, will join the streaming platform in early 2025. The deal includes exclusive rights for five-years and was valued at a gob-smacking $5 billion. Add the hotly anticipated grudge match between boxer Mike Tyson and “boxer” Logan Paul, scheduled to steam on the platform this summer, and we’ve got a paradigm shift on our hands.

Leveraging the Title Search tool in LinkUp’s Public Company Dashboard, we filtered all listings posted by the streamer since the top of 2022 by job title to see how the company’s public declarations square up to internal moves. The data speaks for itself: our Compass graph below indicates a ~150% YOY increase in job listings at Netflix with “LIVE” in the title.

Who knows, maybe by 2026 we’ll all be watching The Oscars on Netflix, America’s new home for live entertainment…

Keep ahead of the company curve with LinkUp job market data. And stay tuned for more of our Notes from The Evidence Lab, where we showcase the engaging interface and unmatched specificity of our job market dataset.

Fig. 1: Netflix Active Listings with “LIVE” in Job Title since 1/1/22

Request a Compass Demo

If you'd like to learn more about LinkUp Compass options and see a live demo, contact us today!