Europe added more than 600,000 ICT specialists to its workforce between 2024 and 2025, bringing the total to around 10.45 million, according to Eurostat. Yet the supply is still nowhere near the European Union’s 2030 target of 20 million ICT specialists.
That gap helps explain something hiring teams are increasingly running into: a company can have access to more tech professionals than it did a decade ago and still struggle to fill a specialised engineering role.
The problem is not simply that there are too few engineers. It is that the engineers with the right combination of experience are spread across different markets, working for different companies and being approached by employers that may be thousands of kilometres away.
A backend engineer in Romania can be considered by a German company without relocating. A Polish software developer can interview for a Dutch role from their own home. A cybersecurity specialist in France can work for an employer in another country without changing cities.
International recruitment has made those connections easier. It has also made the competition much harder to ignore.
A company searching outside its home market is no longer competing only with employers in the same city or country. It is entering the same pool as other international employers looking for the same scarce skills.
That is why asking how to recruit tech talent internationally is not really a question about how many countries a company can search. It is about knowing which markets contain the skills you need, how those candidates compare opportunities and what your company needs to do to compete for them.
And that requires a different approach to recruitment.
How to Recruit Tech Talent Internationally Effectively
International recruitment often starts with a country list.
Germany. Poland. Romania. Spain. Portugal. The Netherlands.
The list gets longer, but the strategy does not necessarily get better.
Each market has its own mix of technical skills, experience levels, salary expectations, languages, employment conditions and competition between employers. A country with a large technology workforce is not automatically the best place to find a particular engineer.
The numbers illustrate the difference.
In 2025, Germany had around 2.3 million ICT specialists, the largest ICT workforce in the EU. France had roughly 1.4 million, Spain more than 1 million and Italy around 900,000. But measuring ICT specialists as a share of total employment produces a different picture: Sweden was at 8.9%, Luxembourg at 8.7% and Finland at 7.8%, while Romania was at 2.7%.
Those figures are useful, but they do not answer the recruitment question on their own.
A large market gives an employer more potential candidates. A high concentration of ICT specialists tells you that technology plays a larger role in that country’s workforce. Neither tells you whether the five people who can handle your particular technical problem are available.
That is why international recruitment should start with the skill and work backwards towards the market.
Start With the Engineering Problem
“Senior software engineer” is not a particularly useful international search profile.
The employer needs to know what that engineer will actually do.
Maybe the company is scaling a platform that struggles under heavy traffic. Perhaps it is migrating a legacy system to the cloud. It could be building a cybersecurity function from scratch or taking an AI product from experimentation into production.
Those jobs require different experience even when the job titles overlap.
Once the problem is defined, the recruiter can search for people who have solved similar problems. That may uncover candidates whose titles do not match the vacancy but whose experience is exactly what the company needs.
This is one of the biggest advantages of international recruitment when it is done properly. The company is no longer limited by the terminology used by employers in its own market.
Search for Capability, Not Just Job Titles
A DevOps engineer in one country might be a platform engineer in another.
A site reliability engineer might be doing work that another company calls cloud infrastructure engineering.
A cybersecurity specialist could be described as an application security engineer, security architect or information security engineer.
The technology does not always change.
The label does.
That means international sourcing needs to account for different naming conventions. A recruiter searching only for the exact title in the vacancy can miss people who have been doing the work under another name for years.
The same principle applies to seniority. One company’s “Senior Engineer” can have less responsibility than another company’s “Engineer III.” Comparing titles without understanding the underlying role creates unnecessary confusion.
The People You Want Are Often Already Employed
The larger the international market becomes, the less useful it is to think only about applicants.
Experienced technical professionals often have no reason to apply for every job that appears online. They already have an income, colleagues, projects and some degree of security.
The employer has to give them a reason to start a conversation.
That begins with the approach.
A message saying that a company is “looking for talented engineers to join an exciting international team” could describe thousands of vacancies.
A message explaining that the company is rebuilding its payments infrastructure and needs somebody who has already led a similar migration is much more specific.
The candidate can immediately see why they were contacted.
That matters because international recruitment is not simply about finding people who fit the job.
It is about getting the people who fit the job to consider yours.
Also read: How to Hire AI Engineers in Romania
How to Choose the Right Country for Recruitment
There is no single best country for international tech recruitment.
There is a best market for a particular search.
An employer should compare several factors before deciding where to focus.
Talent availability tells you whether enough people with the required experience exist.
Competition tells you how many other employers are trying to hire them.
Compensation tells you whether your budget is realistic.
Language tells you whether candidates can operate effectively within the organisation.
Employment requirements tell you how straightforward it will be to hire them.
Time zones matter for distributed teams that need regular overlap.
The interesting part is how these factors interact.
A market can have excellent technical talent but intense competition. Another may have fewer candidates but a stronger match for the particular role. A third might look attractive on salary but create complications elsewhere.
International recruitment works best when employers compare the whole picture rather than choosing a country because someone described it as a “tech hub.”
Why Romania Belongs in the Conversation
Romania is a useful example because simple rankings can give an incomplete picture.
Eurostat recorded ICT specialists at 2.7% of total employment in Romania in 2025, compared with around 5% across the EU. Yet Romania has an established software and IT services industry and a substantial pool of professionals working with international businesses.
The country also has a relatively strong technology education pipeline. European Commission data has repeatedly highlighted the importance of Romania’s graduates in ICT and science-related fields.
That makes Romania relevant to international employers, but not for the simplistic reason that it is supposedly a cheaper place to hire engineers.
The useful question is whether the Romanian market contains the particular skills the employer needs.
For one company, that might mean software development. For another, cloud engineering or cybersecurity. The value comes from matching the market to the vacancy rather than treating an entire country as one talent pool.
International Recruitment Gets More Complicated Outside the EU
Hiring across European borders is one thing.
Hiring outside the EU introduces another set of considerations.
An employer may find an excellent engineer in India, Brazil, Nigeria or another non-EU market. Suddenly, the search involves questions around work authorisation, immigration, tax, employment structures and local compliance.
The European Commission is already trying to make access to international talent easier. In June 2026, it highlighted the EU Talent Pool and updated Single Permit rules as part of efforts to help employers address labour shortages and attract workers from outside the EU.
Those measures do not remove the employer’s responsibilities.
They do, however, reflect a wider shift: European businesses increasingly need access to skills that cannot always be supplied by their domestic labour markets.
For an employer, that means international recruitment should include the question, “Can we actually employ this person?” before the candidate reaches the final stage.
Salary Is Not a Country Average
International hiring can go wrong when companies rely too heavily on salary benchmarks.
An employer sees that salaries in Country A are lower than in Country B and assumes that candidates in Country A will accept a significantly lower offer.
That may not happen.
A senior engineer may already work for an international company. They may be paid according to a wider European market. They may have several remote opportunities available to them.
The relevant competition is therefore not necessarily the average salary in the candidate’s country.
It is the offers available to that candidate.
That distinction becomes particularly important for scarce skills. The more difficult someone is to replace, the less useful a generic salary benchmark becomes.
English Can Expand the Search, But It Does Not Solve Everything
English is often one of the reasons technology companies can recruit internationally.
Software teams already work with documentation, tools and colleagues across borders, so English can allow employers to consider candidates from markets they would otherwise struggle to reach.
But language requirements should still be connected to the job.
A developer who needs to collaborate with an international engineering team has different communication requirements from a technical consultant who spends half their time presenting to clients.
Employers should define what communication the role actually requires rather than automatically demanding “native-level English.”
The goal is effective communication.
Not an accent.
Don’t Make the Hiring Process Longer Because the Candidate Is Abroad
International candidates already face uncertainty.
They may be unfamiliar with the company. They may be considering opportunities in several countries. They may have a notice period or need to understand how the employment arrangement will work.
A slow recruitment process adds another reason to leave.
That does not mean companies should skip proper assessment.
It means the process needs structure.
The candidate should know what happens next, who they will meet and when they can expect an answer. Interview stages should have a purpose rather than existing because “that’s how we usually do it.”
For an experienced engineer who is already employed, four weeks of silence between interviews can be enough to end the process.
Someone else may simply make an offer first.
Assess the Person Behind the International CV
Recruiters can struggle when candidates come from unfamiliar markets because CV formats, job titles and educational backgrounds differ.
That makes the interview more important.
Instead of relying on the title, ask what the candidate actually owned.
What did they build?
What decisions did they make?
What went wrong?
What would they do differently?
Which parts of the system were theirs?
The answers reveal much more than a list of technologies.
A candidate who can explain the trade-offs behind a technical decision demonstrates something far more useful than someone who can simply name the tools they have used.
This becomes especially important for senior roles, where judgement matters as much as technical knowledge.
Remote Work Has Made International Recruitment More Practical
The growth of remote and hybrid work has removed one of the biggest barriers to international recruitment: relocation.
Eurofound’s 2026 research shows that telework and hybrid work have become established forms of working across Europe rather than temporary arrangements left over from the pandemic.
For technology companies, that creates a wider range of options.
The company can recruit someone who stays in their home country. It can build distributed teams across several markets. It can use remote work as a way to access specialist skills without opening another office.
But the arrangement needs to be genuine.
If a supposedly remote employee has to travel to headquarters every other week, the company should say so. If the team requires four hours of daily overlap, that needs to be clear before the candidate accepts.
International recruitment becomes much easier when both sides know exactly what they are agreeing to.
When Does an International Recruitment Agency Make Sense?
There is a difference between recruiting internationally and simply posting a vacancy internationally.
A company can put its job advertisement on a global platform tomorrow.
That does not mean it understands the markets it is entering.
An international recruitment partner can help when the employer needs access to passive candidates, specialist communities or markets where it has no established network.
The best partner should be able to answer practical questions.
Where would you search for this role?
Why that market?
What candidates are available?
What compensation are they likely to expect?
Which requirements are making the search unnecessarily narrow?
What would make those candidates consider moving?
Those answers are more valuable than a promise of a large database.
Final Thoughts
International recruitment works when the company stops treating geography as the strategy.
The strategy is the skill.
Once the company understands the technical problem it needs to solve, it can identify the markets where that experience is likely to exist. From there, the recruiter can approach passive candidates, assess transferable experience and build an offer that makes sense against the competition.
The process also needs to account for the parts of international hiring that happen outside the interview room: employment arrangements, time zones, language, compensation and compliance.
None of this means a company needs to recruit everywhere.
It means the company should know why it is recruiting in the markets it chooses.
Europe’s technology workforce is growing, but the continent still faces a substantial shortage of advanced digital skills. The European Commission expects that gap to remain a challenge as demand for AI, cloud, cybersecurity and other technologies continues to expand.
For employers, international recruitment will increasingly become less of an emergency response and more of a normal part of workforce planning.
The companies that adapt early will have something more useful than a longer list of countries.
They will have a better understanding of where their talent actually comes from.
Need Help Recruiting Tech Talent Across Markets?
If your next software engineer, DevOps specialist, cybersecurity professional or other technical hire may be outside your usual market, BrainSource can help put the right recruitment expertise behind the search.
