Judging the market by number of listings might be deceptive; yes, there are not a lot of Elixir jobs out there, but there are also not a lot of Elixir devs out there.
I don’t have hard numbers, but a hiring manager with whom I interviewed recently told me companies are looking everywhere for Elixir talent and having a very hard time finding it.
Elixir jobs also seem to pay better than those using more widespread languages (e.g. Java, JS, and non-AI-related Python), and are more likely to be fully-remote or at least somewhat flexible about WFH. So answering “how good is the market” also has a qualitative dimension.
If you have a decent amount of experience in other languages, learning Elixir to the point where you can demonstrate passion and potential should not take more than a weekend or two. I recently watched about half of the Pragmatic Studio course on Elixir: https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/elixir
I did it in preparation for a coding challenge, wrote some decent Elixir code, received good feedback about my work during the follow-up interview, and am hoping to start a new Elixir job next month.
I did some Ruby/Rails courses and tutorials back in 2012-2014 (Code School/Michael Hartl) before plunging into Python and later Java. I have no real-world experience in Ruby/Rails, but I do feel that my familiarity with that ecosystem and mindset helped me learn Elixir fairly quickly and have an intelligent conversation with my prospective colleagues.
I hope I’m not giving you false hopes, but really, you could do a lot worse than spend some time becoming at least acquainted with Elixir. If you fall in love with it, like I have, you might not even care how “good” the job market is.
Automated screening is incredibly rude. Imagine if candidates started writing resumes/cover letters using AI. How would companies feel?