Tech firms offer 14k euros while claiming talent shortage

Tech firms offer 14k euros while claiming talent shortage

The complaint repeats in every open recruitment drive: there are no candidates. Dig deeper, and a different version of the same problem appears. There are candidates; what’s missing are competitive salaries. In one cited offer, a company demanded language proficiency and offered between 14,000 and 17,000 euros per year. The conclusion from those who saw it was that restocking shelves in a supermarket paid better. There is a talent shortage, claims the business narrative; the offered price invites doubt.

Why do companies claim they can’t find talent?

Because often they describe a profile that doesn’t exist in the market and expect to find it at an intern’s price. In technical processes, the requirements list has become a catalog: years of experience in newly emerging technologies, combinations of skills that are practically contradictory, and a new layer of AI-related demands. Those who don’t declare themselves experts are filtered out before the first interview.

The filter doesn’t always measure what it claims to. A technical recruiter at a large listed company states that they hire 1% of applicants and still struggle to fill vacancies: it took nine months to find a manager and a year to find developers. Their diagnosis is that applicant quality has dropped. “The last candidate claimed nine years of experience but performed the test as I would after three months of study,” he summarizes.

Years of experience in technologies that just emerged

The sector itself admits job descriptions have gotten out of hand. Trendy terms, from full stack to devops, are used to demand everything from one person. Some recall an extreme case of a developer rejected for not proving enough years of experience using libraries he himself created: they asked for more time working with them than the libraries had existed.

When it’s not technology, it’s the function. Offers demanding a huge range of skills often reduce to two tasks in daily practice. As one source notes, 80% of the requirements are superfluous. The result is a vacancy that remains open.

The drafter paid as an administrative assistant

Some cases explain the shortage better than any report. A company sought a drafter for its technical office: CAD software proficiency, part design, order processing, quote preparation, and half of commercial work. All this, yet the contract was to list the role as administrative assistant, the second-lowest position in the collective agreement, rather than as a drafter, which is the second-highest. The professional category isn’t paid; it’s disguised.

This detail permeates most complaints. There are offers below collective agreement rates, conditions communicated with “that’s just how it is,” and turnover treated as an inevitable cost. Companies save on payroll but pay in lost training, stalled projects, and candidates who never answer the phone again.

Training juniors or waiting for non-existent experts

The alternative has been on the table from the start: if you can’t find someone already productive in the market, you train them. A senior engineer can rely on junior profiles for bureaucratic and repetitive tasks while they gain experience. This is what forward-looking companies do, it’s argued. The problem is the next step: it’s assumed that more workload means more learning. That’s where the burnout starts, ending with the trained employee leaving for a competitor.

The context doesn’t help much. The labor market, as recalled in the debate, has come from a long period with unemployment between 20% and 25%, and companies are slow to adjust to much lower rates, with candidates who can choose whether or not to work. Demographics add to this: entire cohorts are retiring.

Why doesn’t Germany fill its technical vacancies either?

Because the underlying problem isn’t just Spanish. There’s talk of a brutal engineer shortage in Germany, yet an engineer who sent resumes to German companies received no response. What’s demanded is the exact experience each company seeks, just like here. His conclusion: either change the mindset, or the staff shortage will worsen.

Against that lies an uncomfortable argument. In a sector with zero unemployment, raising salaries doesn’t create new professionals: it only moves scarce workers from one company to another. If true, the shortage isn’t solved by paychecks but by training or importing profiles. If false, companies have used the excuse for years to avoid paying.

This is exactly where the analysis stalls: no one knows how much of the shortage is real and how much is simply the price companies are willing to pay.