How can companies recruit hard-to-find tech skills when the vacancy has been sitting open for weeks, the applications look promising until someone actually reviews them, and the few candidates who do fit are already working somewhere else?
That is usually the point where a hiring problem stops being about advertising a job.
The company has already written the vacancy. It has posted it on the usual platforms. Recruiters have searched the obvious profiles. Perhaps interviews have even started. Yet the person the engineering team actually wants still has not appeared.
And there is a good reason for that.
The more specialised the role becomes, the smaller the group of people who can genuinely do it. A company looking for someone who knows Python can search a large market. Add cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, distributed systems and several years of production experience, and the search changes completely.
Europe is already dealing with this wider skills problem. The EU had 10.45 million ICT specialists in employment in 2025, equal to 5% of total employment. The figure continues to rise, but not quickly enough to meet the European Union’s target of at least 20 million ICT specialists by 2030.
For employers, that creates an uncomfortable situation. The people with the skills they need are not necessarily sitting around waiting for the next vacancy to appear.
They are already working.
Some are in another company. Some are in another city. Some are in another country. Others have most of the required experience but not the exact combination of technologies written in the job description.
So recruiting difficult tech skills requires more than putting a vacancy in front of more people.
It requires finding out where the skill actually exists, how transferable it is, and what would make someone who already has a job consider moving.
Hard-to-Find Tech Skills Are Often Created by the Job Description
A company may begin a search for a DevOps engineer and ask for AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Python, security experience, CI/CD, five years of experience and strong leadership skills.
Every requirement sounds reasonable.
Put them together, however, and the available market becomes much smaller.
This is why a recruitment search should begin with the work rather than the technology list.
What will this person be responsible for?
Are they building infrastructure from scratch, maintaining an existing environment or leading a migration? Will they spend most of their time writing code, solving production problems or coordinating other engineers?
Those answers can completely change the candidate pool.
A recruiter who understands that difference can search for people with the right experience rather than mechanically looking for every keyword in the vacancy.
The Search Should Follow the Skill, Not the Job Title
Technology professionals do not always have the title an employer expects.
A company searching for a DevOps engineer could find the right person working as a platform engineer, site reliability engineer or cloud infrastructure engineer.
The same thing happens in cybersecurity.
Someone who can solve the company’s problem might call themselves a security engineer, cloud security engineer, application security specialist or security architect.
The title belongs to the previous employer.
The underlying capability belongs to the candidate.
Good sourcing therefore starts with the responsibilities and technical environment and works backwards towards the titles that might contain those people.
That simple change can make a narrow search considerably wider without lowering the standard.
The Candidate You Need May Never Apply
This is where difficult technical recruitment starts to separate itself from ordinary vacancy advertising.
A specialist who is already employed has little reason to search for another job every evening. They may already earn well, have flexibility and know exactly what their current role involves.
The company therefore cannot assume that posting a vacancy will reach them.
It has to go looking.
Direct sourcing, referrals, professional networks, specialist communities and existing candidate relationships become more important as the profile gets more specialised.
The approach also needs to be specific.
An experienced engineer has probably received enough messages saying, “I came across your profile and think you’d be a great fit.”
A better recruiter can explain what caught their attention.
Perhaps the candidate has spent three years scaling infrastructure that resembles the employer’s environment. Perhaps they have led a migration that the company is about to begin. Perhaps they have worked with a technology stack that is difficult to find in the employer’s local market.
The first message should demonstrate that somebody actually looked.
Geography Can Be the Difference Between an Impossible Search and a Manageable One
Sometimes the company has already searched the right people.
It has simply searched in the wrong place.
The distribution of technology talent across Europe is uneven. In 2025, ICT specialists represented 8.9% of employment in Sweden, 8.7% in Luxembourg and 7.8% in Finland, compared with 2.7% in Romania.
Those figures do not tell an employer which country has the best engineer for a particular vacancy. They do show why treating Europe as one uniform labour market can lead to poor recruitment decisions.
A company that cannot find a particular skill locally should ask whether location is genuinely essential.
Could the role be remote?
Could the company hire elsewhere in the EU?
Could a recruiter search several markets simultaneously?
Could the candidate relocate?
Those decisions should happen early rather than after three months of unsuccessful local sourcing.
Romania Is Part of the Talent Equation
Romania is particularly interesting in this discussion because its overall share of ICT specialists is among the lowest in the EU, yet the country has a meaningful technology workforce and some distinctive characteristics.
In 2025, Romania had one of the highest proportions of women among ICT specialists in the EU, at around 28%, compared with an EU average of about 19%.
The more useful question for employers, however, is not whether Romania has the highest percentage of ICT specialists.
It is whether the Romanian market contains the particular experience they need.
A company looking for software engineers, infrastructure specialists or other technical professionals may find a different balance of experience, salary expectations and availability than it would in Western European markets.
That makes Romania useful as part of a wider sourcing strategy rather than simply as a destination for lower-cost hiring.
Stop Treating Every Missing Skill as a Deal Breaker
This is one of the easiest ways to make a difficult recruitment search impossible.
A candidate has eight years of relevant engineering experience but has worked mainly with AWS rather than Azure.
Rejected.
Another has extensive infrastructure experience but has never held the exact title the employer specified.
Rejected.
Another has excellent cybersecurity experience but comes from a different industry.
Rejected again.
Eventually, the company concludes that nobody suitable exists.
Sometimes the problem is not the talent market.
It is the definition of suitable.
A recruiter should help separate skills that must exist on day one from skills that a capable professional can learn.
An engineer who understands cloud architecture, networking and infrastructure automation may be able to become productive on a different cloud platform far faster than a less experienced candidate can develop the underlying engineering judgement.
That distinction is particularly valuable when recruiting senior people.
Test Whether They Can Do the Work
A CV can tell you that someone has used Kubernetes.
It cannot tell you how they behave when production goes down at 2 a.m.
It can tell you that someone has worked in cybersecurity.
It cannot tell you how they would prioritise an incident involving a compromised account.
It can tell you that an AI engineer has worked with machine-learning models.
It cannot tell you whether they understand what happens when a model performs well in development but fails once real users interact with it.
The assessment should therefore resemble the work.
A practical conversation about architecture can reveal more than a generic technical quiz. A realistic debugging problem can reveal how someone thinks under pressure. Asking a candidate to explain a previous technical decision can show whether they actually owned the work described on the CV.
The more specialised the role, the more important this becomes.
AI Has Made Old Screening Methods Less Useful
There is another reason to rethink technical assessment.
AI tools are now part of normal development workflows. The European Commission reports that almost 20% of EU enterprises were using AI in 2026, with adoption increasing sharply in 2025.
That does not mean technical ability has become less important.
It means employers need to assess it differently.
If an engineer would normally use AI to investigate a problem, write boilerplate code or compare approaches, allowing that during an assessment may actually produce a more realistic picture of how they work.
The interviewer can then examine the candidate’s reasoning.
Why did they accept the AI-generated solution?
What did they change?
What did they distrust?
How did they test it?
That can reveal technical judgement, which is much harder to fake than familiarity with a list of technologies.
Also read: What Is a Talent Marketplace?
Give Scarce Candidates Something Worth Moving For
There is another problem that appears after the recruiter finally finds the right person.
The candidate says no.
The salary may be too low. The role may offer little autonomy. The technology may not be interesting. The interview process may be too long. The company may have failed to explain what makes the opportunity different from the candidate’s current job.
This is particularly important when recruiting people who are already employed.
The employer is not competing only against other vacancies.
It is competing against the candidate’s current situation.
That means the recruitment brief should include the reason someone would move.
Perhaps they get ownership of a major technical project. Perhaps they gain access to a stronger engineering organisation. Perhaps the company offers genuine remote flexibility. Perhaps the role gives them a path into architecture or technical leadership.
Whatever the reason, the recruiter needs to know it.
Otherwise they are trying to sell an opportunity without knowing what makes it attractive.
Sometimes the Answer Is to Build the Skill
Recruitment is not the only way to respond to a skills shortage.
The EU’s own numbers show the scale of the problem. ICT specialists represented just 5% of employment in 2025, while the 2030 target is 10%. The Commission’s current trajectory suggests the EU could reach only around 12 million ICT specialists by 2030 without a significant change in pace.
Companies therefore have to make a choice for some roles.
Do they compete harder for experienced specialists?
Do they widen the requirements?
Or do they hire people with strong foundations and develop the missing skills internally?
That third option is often overlooked because recruitment is usually measured against an immediate vacancy.
But if a company expects the same specialist profile to remain difficult to find for the next several years, building an internal pipeline may make more sense than repeatedly paying a premium for the same scarce experience.
This Is Where a Specialist Recruitment Partner Can Help
There is a point where an internal recruitment team can know exactly what it wants and still struggle to find it.
The problem is no longer writing the vacancy.
It is access to the market.
A specialist technology recruitment agency can add another sourcing network, relationships with passive candidates and knowledge of the markets where particular skills are more available.
The important part is specialisation.
A recruiter who understands software engineering is not automatically equipped to recruit cybersecurity specialists. A recruiter who knows the Romanian market may not understand the candidate dynamics in Germany or the Netherlands.
For genuinely difficult roles, employers should look for recruiters who can explain where they would search, which adjacent profiles they would consider and what the market is likely to demand in return.
Final Thoughts
The companies that recruit difficult technology skills well tend to make the search more flexible without making the standard lower.
They define the actual technical problem first. They distinguish essential capabilities from preferences. They search beyond exact job titles. They approach passive candidates instead of waiting for applications. They look across European markets when geography allows it. They assess practical judgement rather than simply checking technology keywords.
And they make the opportunity worth discussing.
That last part matters because the best candidate may already have a perfectly acceptable job.
You cannot force them to apply.
You can give them a reason to listen.
Need Help Finding Hard-to-Find Tech Talent?
For companies looking for software engineers, DevOps specialists, cybersecurity professionals and other hard-to-find tech skills, BrainSource can help put the right recruitment expertise behind the search.
