Four public datasets on the state of global hiring — ManpowerGroup, the World Economic Forum, OECD, and the U.S. BLS — and what they mean for specialist searches this year.
2 April 2026 · 8 min read
"Talent shortage" is one of those phrases that has been used so loosely it has stopped meaning anything. It gets quoted in keynote slides, used to justify price increases, and wheeled out by recruiters to explain why a search has gone sideways. Most of the time, the number behind it is either invented or quoted out of context. So we've gone back to four public datasets that actually can be defended on a call.
ManpowerGroup publishes an annual survey of roughly 40,000 employers across 42 countries, asking the same question each year: are you having difficulty filling roles? In the 2024 edition, 75% of employers reported talent shortage — the highest figure recorded since the survey began in 2006. The number has risen every year since 2020 and is up from 69% in 2023. The report is public at go.manpowergroup.com/talent-shortage.
The most in-demand roles in the 2024 survey were, in order: IT and data, engineering, sales and marketing, operations and logistics, and manufacturing and production. Every one of those is a specialist discipline. Every one of them is inside the NextForce remit.
The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs report surveyed over 1,000 employers across 22 industries and 55 economies representing more than 14 million workers. Its headline finding for our sector: 39% of a typical worker's core skills are expected to change or become outdated between 2025 and 2030, with AI and data literacy leading the list of fastest-growing skill requirements. The full report is downloadable at weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025.
What that number means in practice: the specialist you hired in 2022 is not the specialist you need in 2026. Retention and upskilling have become a component of the hiring strategy, not a separate HR project. And the half-life on a "senior" title has shortened meaningfully.
The OECD Employment Outlook for 2024 is the most useful public source on cross-country labour market tightness. Its headline measure — vacancy-to-unemployment ratio — remained elevated in 2024 across most member economies, though down from the 2022 peak. In the United States, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, the ratio stayed materially above pre-pandemic norms, meaning there are still more open roles per unemployed worker than there were in 2019. The report is available at oecd.org/employment-outlook.
This matters because it tells you the shortage is structural, not cyclical. It will not be solved by the next downturn. A hiring strategy built around waiting for the market to soften is going to be waiting for a long time.
The JOLTS series (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) is the cleanest monthly read on US labour demand. Throughout 2024, job openings tracked between 7.5 and 8.2 million per month — down from the 2022 peak of roughly 12 million, but still above the pre-pandemic average of around 7 million. The quits rate — a cleaner proxy for labour market tightness than headline unemployment — sat at 2.0–2.2%, meaning roughly one in fifty workers voluntarily leaves a job each month. Live data is at bls.gov/jlt.
The four datasets point to the same conclusion from different angles. Specialist talent is scarce, skills are moving faster than incumbents can absorb, and the structural tightness of the market is a 2025–2030 feature, not a temporary post-pandemic distortion. The implication for hiring is unglamorous: fewer searches, worked deeper, with better briefs and more time invested in calibration. The firms winning in this market are not the ones spraying most widely. They are the ones choosing most carefully.
Sources: ManpowerGroup Global Talent Shortage Survey 2024; WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025; OECD Employment Outlook 2024; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS series 2024. All figures accessible via the links above at time of publication.
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