According to ManpowerGroup’s “Talent Shortage” report, 57% of Polish employers admit they face difficulties in attracting new employees. This is 2 percentage points less than a year ago, and the indicator has been declining for 5 years. However, this does not mean that pressure in the market is decreasing. Its nature is changing. The largest shortage of new staff concerns the information and communication sector, hospitality, gastronomy and tourism, as well as industrial production. The hardest candidates to find are those with engineering, sales and marketing skills, as well as skills related to the use of AI.

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The greatest recruitment challenges are reported by companies in the information and communication sector (67%), hospitality, gastronomy and tourism (63%), and industrial production (61%). This is a change compared with 2025, when talent shortages were most often felt in transport, logistics and automotive (71%), life sciences and healthcare (67%), as well as industry and raw materials (61%).

- As Tomasz Walenczak, General Manager of ManpowerGroup Poland, says, for five years we have observed that the scale of challenges in acquiring new employees has been decreasing year by year, but the starting point was the record years 2021–2022. – They were characterized by a very strong economic rebound, huge demand for employees, and a record number of vacancies. In 2024–2025 these factors gave way to normalization and slowdown. The labor market is no longer as tight, and demand for employees is weaker. In fact, some industries made corrections after post-pandemic growth, deciding to reduce headcount. Data from the last two years show that companies have reduced the number of published job offers, especially in the private sector. Their smaller number has increased competition among candidates. On the other hand, high living costs increase willingness to work, and many people decide to take on additional employment. Currently, companies are more cautious about pay raises, and candidates are more financially flexible. Companies’ approach to recruitment has also changed: they are moving away from mass hiring toward acquiring highly specialized skills, and we will observe this phenomenon in the coming years. The labor market is shifting from a quantitative shortage to a qualitative shortage – he adds.

TOP 5 hardest hard skills to find

As in the previous year, it is hardest to find candidates with engineering skills. Currently, 21% of companies say this. In second place is sales and marketing (19%), which moved up from 7th place in 2025. Third place is practical knowledge of AI tools (18%), which appears in the ranking for the first time. Another 17% complain about a lack of skills in creating AI-based models and applications, which is also new in this year’s study. The same share of companies points to shortages in production and manufacturing (down from 4th place in 2025).

– AI-related competencies account for two of the five hardest to acquire. In Poland, they have almost displaced traditional IT and data analysis skills, which fell to seventh place in our country’s ranking. Interestingly, the global results of our report show an even stronger trend. Worldwide, AI skills have overtaken all others, including traditional engineering and IT skills – says Tomasz Walenczak. – Looking at the study results, such a strong rise in sales and marketing competencies may be surprising. This shows that companies increasingly appreciate their importance, not only in the context of generating revenue, but also in adapting to a changing market and new technologies. In the face of growing competition and the digitalization of sales channels, the ability to effectively acquire customers and use marketing tools is becoming increasingly important – he adds.

How do organizations intend to cope with talent shortages?

More than one quarter of surveyed companies (27%) already report that they want to acquire the required competencies by developing currently employed staff. Declarations regarding salary increases (22%) and greater workplace flexibility (21%) also ranked high. Interestingly, a year ago it was salary growth that dominated among solutions used by companies; many opted for reskilling and upskilling, as well as reaching for new sources of talent.

– The future of acquiring competencies will not be based solely on recruiting new employees, but also on changing the skills of current staff. A key challenge in the coming years will be the declining availability of workers resulting from unfavorable demographic trends. Poland is currently one of the fastest-aging societies in Europe, which means a systematic decrease in the number of people of working age. For this reason, the importance of transferable skills will grow in parallel, enabling employees to change roles during their careers. In company responses, we also see that only every fourth one decides on greater flexibility of working time or part-time work. Organizations that abandon such solutions lose access to huge, untapped labor market resources, including people with disabilities, parents of young children, caregivers of dependent persons, employees returning after a career break, and seniors – summarizes the head of ManpowerGroup Poland.

About the report: The “Talent Shortage” report was prepared on the basis of a survey conducted among 502 companies in Poland. The survey was also carried out globally in 41 countries among nearly 40,000 enterprises, between 1–31.10.2025.