What Slows Down IT Recruitment in Europe?

Europe employed 10.45 million ICT specialists in 2025, according to Eurostat, representing 5% of everyone employed across the European Union. The number has continued to rise, although growth slowed to 2.6% between 2024 and 2025.

So why does recruiting IT professionals still take so long?

That is the question worth asking because the numbers do not suggest that Europe has run out of people who work in technology. The problem sits elsewhere. Companies are looking for particular skills, at particular levels of experience, in particular locations, and often within salary ranges that do not line up neatly with what candidates expect.

Eurostat’s data makes the mismatch quite clear. Among EU companies that tried to recruit ICT specialists in 2023, 57.5% reported difficulties filling those vacancies. The most frequently reported problem was not a lack of jobs or even a lack of recruiters. It was a lack of applications, reported by 43.24% of those businesses. Employers also cited insufficient qualifications, high salary expectations and lack of experience.

That changes the conversation.

If companies are struggling to get suitable applications in the first place, simply telling recruiters to “hire faster” does not solve much.

The Talent Exists. It Just Isn’t Sitting in Your Applicant Pool.

This is probably the biggest misunderstanding in IT recruitment.

A company can publish a vacancy for a senior software engineer and receive fifty applications without actually having fifty candidates worth interviewing. The number of applications tells you very little about the quality of the available talent.

Experienced IT professionals are often already employed. They may not be checking job boards, updating their CVs or sending applications every evening. Some will consider moving if the right opportunity reaches them, but they are unlikely to enter a recruitment process simply because a company has posted another vacancy.

That helps explain why lack of applications remains such a significant problem in the European data. The issue is not necessarily that qualified people do not exist. Employers may simply not be reaching them through the channels they are using.

For a company recruiting a junior position, advertising may produce enough candidates to work with. For a business looking for a senior cybersecurity specialist or an engineer with experience scaling complex cloud infrastructure, the approach needs to be much more targeted.

The Definition of “Qualified” Is Getting Narrower

Technology companies are also asking for increasingly specialised combinations of skills.

A vacancy may require cloud experience, a particular programming language, knowledge of cybersecurity, experience in a regulated industry and several years of leadership. Every additional requirement reduces the number of people who can realistically qualify.

That does not mean companies should remove technical requirements simply to increase applications. It means hiring managers need to distinguish between skills that are genuinely essential and preferences that have gradually found their way into the job description.

There is a substantial difference between saying, “We need someone who can solve this problem,” and saying, “We need someone who has used these seven tools in exactly this environment.”

The first describes the capability.

The second describes a very small section of the labour market.

Salary Can Stop a Recruitment Process Before It Starts

Salary expectations are another barrier identified by Eurostat.

This becomes particularly complicated in Europe because there isn’t one European technology salary market.

A senior engineer in Bucharest is not necessarily evaluating an offer in the same way as a senior engineer in Berlin or Amsterdam. Cost of living, taxation, remote-work arrangements, benefits, local competition and the presence of international employers all influence what candidates consider attractive.

An employer that copies a salary range from one country and applies it to another can therefore create a recruitment problem without realising it.

The vacancy goes live.

Candidates see the compensation.

The strongest people move on.

The company concludes that there are not enough candidates.

Sometimes the problem was the offer.

Hiring Managers Can Become the Bottleneck

Recruitment is not entirely controlled by recruiters.

A candidate can be sourced on Monday and still be waiting for an interview three weeks later because the hiring manager has been travelling, the technical team cannot agree on interview availability or the final approval is sitting with someone who has not yet reviewed the role.

This matters more in IT recruitment because experienced candidates tend to have alternatives.

A company may spend weeks finding someone who fits the technical requirements and then lose that person because the internal process moves too slowly.

The European Commission’s latest Digital Decade report says shortages of ICT specialists remain significant across the EU, despite progress in digital skills and technology adoption.

In that environment, recruitment speed is not simply an operational metric.

It can affect whether a candidate remains available at all.

Europe Is Also Trying to Build the Workforce Faster Than It Can Replace the Gaps

The European Union has set a target of reaching 20 million ICT specialists by 2030. The current figure is considerably lower, which means the continent needs to continue expanding its technology workforce while businesses are already competing for the specialists available today.

That creates a longer-term problem for employers.

They cannot rely entirely on the existing pool of experienced professionals because demand for digital skills is expanding into more industries. Automotive companies need software engineers. Banks need cybersecurity specialists. Manufacturers need data and automation expertise. Healthcare companies increasingly require digital infrastructure and analytics capabilities.

IT recruitment is therefore no longer confined to technology companies.

Almost every sector is becoming a technology employer in some form.

Cross-Border Hiring Adds Another Layer

For companies willing to recruit across Europe, the talent pool becomes much larger.

It also becomes more complicated.

A business hiring in several countries needs to understand local salary expectations, candidate availability, employment practices and differences in how professionals approach job changes. The European labour market may look connected from a distance, but individual technology markets still behave differently.

This is one reason Romania, Poland, Czechia and other Central and Eastern European markets have become increasingly relevant to international employers. Companies are looking beyond their immediate geography because the skills they need may be available elsewhere.

But finding a country with strong IT talent is only the beginning.

The employer still has to reach the people it wants.

So What Actually Makes IT Recruitment Faster?

The answer isn’t simply to advertise more vacancies.

Companies need to know whether their problem is sourcing, salary, requirements, location, employer proposition or the internal hiring process. Those are different problems and require different solutions.

If applications are poor, expanding job-board spending may not help. The company may need direct sourcing or access to specialist networks.

If candidates are interested but rejecting offers, salary benchmarking and a review of the overall proposition may be more useful.

If candidates are disappearing halfway through the process, the hiring workflow itself probably needs attention.

And if the company is struggling to find a particular skill in its home market, expanding the search geographically may make more sense than repeatedly searching the same pool.

That diagnosis is where recruitment expertise becomes valuable.

The Companies That Hire Well Understand the Market Before They Search It

The most useful question isn’t, “How do we get more CVs?”

It is, “What is preventing the right people from entering our process?”

Europe has millions of ICT professionals and continues to increase that number. Yet businesses still report difficulty finding the particular people they need.

That tells us the challenge isn’t simply a shortage of people.

It is a matching problem.

The right skills may be in another city. The right candidate may already have a job. The salary may be below market expectations. The job description may be asking for an unnecessarily narrow combination of experience. Or the company’s own recruitment process may be taking too long.

Until employers identify which of those problems they actually have, adding more vacancies to the internet is unlikely to fix the situation.

And that is what makes IT recruitment in Europe so difficult: the talent market isn’t empty. It’s just much harder to reach the exact people companies need.