Purpose This study aims to understand the effect of the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) as a driver of emerging employment practices, specifically those that create or communicate sustainability-related jobs. It seeks to explore whether job markets mirror regulatory requirements, how organizations signal sustainability requirements in hiring and which sectors are ahead or behind the curve in CSRD-aligned recruitment. Design/methodology/approach Leveraging a database of over 35,000 LinkedIn job positions across Europe, authors pursue an empirical approach. Text is classified using a BERT classifier, which has been fine-tuned to identify whether postings are CSRD-related. Keyword analysis and other text mining methods are used to determine which terms are most often associated with sustainability. It then addresses sectoral distributions, temporal dynamics and semantic framing of sustainability language. Findings Just 3.8% of the analyzed jobs are directly CSRD-related, which demonstrates a lack of alignment between the expectations framed by the CSRD strategy and market signaling. CSRD-related job postings are focused on the staffing, IT consulting, finance and environmental services. Most job ads do not use explicit CSRD terms despite performing relevant functions. Temporal analysis shows a slow but steady rise in CSRD-related job roles, especially post-Q1 2025. Keyword distributions reveal a prevalence of generic sustainability terms over regulatory-specific language, indicating a communication gap. Originality/value This research offers a novel combination of machine learning and semantic analysis, aiming to quantify the effects of the CSRD framework in the digital labor market. The study is one of the first to draw on actual published online job postings as a real-time proxy for how companies are responding to new environmental regulations. The study offers practical implications, which will be useful for policy makers, human resources strategists and educational institutions on minimizing the environmental, social and governance talent gap.
Sardianos et al. (Mon,) studied this question.