Europe's tech job market faces a talent shortage
index.dev
index.dev
I’ve seen a major regression in quality of tech offers in the last couple of years.
Some factors include:
- most worker-friendly hiring sites are gone. Those recruiters were legitimate talent seekers and coaches, we’re back to spray-and-pray copypasted messages on LinkedIn.
- remote opportunities are going away as well, which considering the living costs in large cities is an effective significant cut in the offer. Few people are willing to leave their remote job for a non remote one.
- direct application as a dev is pretty much impossible. You can’t search offers on the main sites because they get drowned in AI spam and removed in minutes. The remaining path is each company’s careers page, which tends have abismal ratios in terms of applying friction vs reply chance.
- processes are very worker unfriendly. Particularly for northern European companies (klarna, Spotify and others) I’ve passed months of rounds, from usual leetcode to IQ tests, only to be ghosted for months after passing, either because they’re keeping an always on pipeline just in case or who knows why.
I have been on both side and the problem is really:
- 1. To be able to filter the incredible amount of fake/very low quality candidates and offers.
- 2. Dealing with the incredibly incompetent HR/Talent function which is dominant even in small companies.
The result is the recruitment process is very long and sometimes openly sadistic.
I have been sometimes motivated to go through it just to stick a big "NO" in their face at the end. Because by the end you know there is no way you want to have to deal with that crazy HR department for years and the whole company is probably disfunctional.
So there is no supply or demand shortage, just an inability to do basic matchmaking.
Only the LinkedIn, SaaS All-in-one-HR recruitment tools and consulting companies win in this market. But LinkedIn is Tinder for corporations, in the end only sociopaths enjoy it.
For the last 3 months, i have applied to ~150+ euro-places, and 20 non-euro. At various levels between senior-engineer and cto. 15-20% replied with no. Only 1% - yes, two leads - were interested but had very-very low budget for what they wanted - and started with that. The rest did not bother to reply (yet? some manage to reply in 2-3 days, other in 2 weeks -or- months, but most - never).
i don't know if it's the AI-hype-blinding, or ageism, or pump-our-numbers, or we-want-super-hero-for-free, or afraid-to-commit-to-any-$$$decisions, or what. But definitely i cannot find a job.
The whole point of your first year of work is that you get upskilled super hard. If you are hiring a fresh grad with the plan that they are a net positive before 8-12 months you are gonna have a horrible time.
Also, the data notes that 83% of the companies surveyed were small enterprises (with 10-49 employees or self-employed persons). It's no surprise that these companies find it more difficult as they tend to be more budget-conscious, meaning they struggle to compete with bigger company salary levels.
The real translation: It is a "Oxbridge/Imperial/ETH Zurich/ grads and experienced senior engineers for cheap" shortage.
Employers are getting this AI.