LinkedIn is flooded with sensational headlines about market talent shortages and the inability to fill roles. To be completely honest, at the beginning of my career, I believed it too. I used to think there were only a handful of candidates on the market for a specific profile, and I would worry myself sick when I couldn't close a position. I thought IT recruitment was a total nightmare and brutally hard.
Today, I believe something entirely different.
I don't believe there is a position that cannot be filled. I believe there are flawed processes, insufficient knowledge, and unrealistic expectations.
By unrealistic expectations, I don't mean companies looking for a technically sound senior who works with a specific technology or across multiple stacks. Such candidates exist and can be found. I am talking about situations where a company looks for a technically sound senior with two years of experience to lead a team, manage a budget, advise clients on complex platforms - and all that for just €1,999 a month.
If a company knows the market, understands budgets, and knows what it truly needs, adequate candidates exist much more often than it seems at first glance.
In this article, I want to address the obstacles I see most frequently when companies conclude that candidates simply do not exist.
Why Job Ads Don’t Represent the True State of the Market
We have analysed job ads many times, and I believe anyone who has ever tried to hire an experienced developer knows that job ads rarely bring the expected results.
Except during periods of massive market layoffs, job ads are not a representative indicator of candidate availability.
The reason is simple.
You aren't looking for candidates who are currently active job seekers. You are looking for people who are already doing the work you need.
And the highest number of quality candidates are precisely passive candidates.
These are people successfully working at other companies, who don't browse job boards every day, and aren't actively planning a career move. That is exactly why the number of job applications tells you very little about how many candidates actually exist on the market.
######If you want to understand more deeply why traditional job ads no longer result in IT recruitment, we wrote about it in more detail here: [Why Has Your Job Ad Been Active for 3 Months While Seniors Reject Your Offers?]
Referrals Are Valuable, But They Are Not a Hiring Strategy
Referrals can be one of the best sources of candidates.
People coming through recommendations often blend into the team more easily, and the probability of a successful hire is higher.
However, after a certain number of hires and recruitment cycles, the referral network naturally begins to dry up.
The company must then have a system and a hiring strategy that doesn't rely solely on the connections of existing employees.
Referrals are a great tool. But they are no substitute for a process.
Why Your Tech Team Shouldn't Run Recruitment on Their Own
When referrals run dry, it often happens that tech leaders take over candidate sourcing.
This has its perks.
When a developer contacts another developer, the message carries much more credibility. Communication is more natural, direct, and built on a mutual understanding of the work. However, there are also severe limitations.
Let’s face reality—a technical person does not have the time to handle recruitment. Nor should they.
Every hour invested in sourcing candidates is an hour not invested in product development, team management, or solving technical issues.
Furthermore, even though a tech leader often knows exactly who they want to hire, their reach is limited. Most often, they will only reach candidates who are immediately visible through basic searches or their existing network of contacts.
That is simply not enough for continuous hiring.
The Biggest Problem in IT Recruitment Is Not a Lack of Candidates
In my opinion, the biggest problem in IT recruitment isn't the candidates.
The most common reasons IT positions stay open longer than expected are misaligned expectations, limited sourcing, and a lack of market understanding.
It is this last one - understanding the market and the technology - that usually makes the biggest difference in practice.
I don't mean a recruiter has to be a developer. But they must understand the technologies well enough to evaluate what a candidate is saying.
A good IT recruiter must know:
- Why React is used for certain products, while Angular is used for others
- What Java is most commonly used for, versus .NET
- Which databases are typically paired with specific tech stacks
- Who is truly a Python engineer, and who uses Python primarily for scripting and automation
When a recruiter doesn't understand the technology, it is incredibly easy to draw the wrong conclusion about a candidate.
Some candidates are excellent speakers and highly skilled at presenting their experience. If you don't understand the technical context, you can easily be swayed by how they talk about their work.
More importantly, you must understand what the candidate is actually saying.
For example, when a candidate says, "
I worked on legacy systems. It was very tough.
"
An inexperienced recruiter might think the candidate worked on highly complex technical problems.
However, very often it means something completely different.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was maintaining old code, resolving technical debt, and reading other people's implementations day in and day out. While that is a challenging experience, it is not the same as working on a highly complex platform where new technical solutions are built, and architectural directions are defined.
Without understanding that context, evaluating a candidate's true value is incredibly difficult.
Industry Knowledge Is Just as Important as Technical Knowledge
Besides technology, a quality IT recruiter must know companies, products, and industries.
When you know what kind of product the position you are hiring for works on, you must also know which companies yield the most similar experience.
Such candidates will be much more frequently interested in a conversation.
Their performance in interviews will be better because they already understand similar challenges, and their onboarding will be shorter.
Because of this, brief chats with developers where someone explains what they are looking for aren't enough.
If you want serious IT recruitment, a recruiter must dedicate time and space to learn - they must understand the core technologies, terminology, and the context in which products are developed.
But just as importantly, the other side of the process must exist too.
Without clear, detailed, and realistic information from the client about what the product actually does, what seniority level is needed, and what kind of environment the candidate will work in, a recruiter cannot make a quality selection.
In that case, the problem is neither the recruiter nor the candidates. The problem lies in an insufficiently defined picture of the role at the start of the process.
How to Find the Candidates Everyone Else Is Missing
Successful recruitment requires someone fully dedicated to the process, who understands the position, the market, and search channels.
A Boolean search will often spit out the same candidates that half the market is already contacting.
That’s why just knowing how to build a search query isn't enough.
You need to know how to bypass the matrix and find people who aren't immediately visible.
That is usually where the line is drawn between average and top-tier sourcing.
There Are More DevOps Candidates Than We Think
I’ve spoken with recruiters multiple times who were convinced that DevOps candidates simply do not exist on the market.
My experience is completely different.
We very often fill DevOps roles in under a month with high-quality candidates.
The reason isn't luck. The reason is understanding the role itself.
When you understand what a DevOps engineer actually does, what tools they use, why they use them, and what types of systems they work on, the market suddenly looks a lot bigger.
The problem often isn’t a lack of candidates. The problem is an insufficient understanding of the candidates we are looking for.
Candidates Don’t Reply to Generic Messages
Even when you find the right candidates, there is still one crucial step left - communication.
One of the most common mistakes I see is sending generic messages that fail to explain why a candidate would even care about the opportunity.
A candidate generally doesn’t care who invested in the product. They don't care how many offices the company has around the world.
They care much more about:
- What the product is
- What problem does it solve
- What kind of challenges will they work on
- What kind of impact will they have on product development
- What they will learn and gain through the job
A good message must be short enough to keep their attention and specific enough to convey value.
This exact difference often determines whether a candidate replies or ignores the message.
The Problem Isn't the Market. The Problem Is the Process.
Over my years in IT recruitment, I’ve stopped believing the theory that there are no candidates.
Much more frequently, I’ve seen processes that are completely disconnected from the market.
When a company understands the role they are hiring for, knows the market conditions, invests in sourcing, understands the technology, and communicates relevant information to candidates, the pool of available options becomes much larger than it appears at first glance.
So, before you conclude that the problem is a lack of candidates, look at your process. Very often, that’s exactly where the answer lies.