European Hiring Signal Index, Q3 2026

What the index measures

The index counts job adverts that European employers had live during the third quarter of 2026, grouped by country and by role family. It is built from the hiring data Ripe Leads collects to find companies for outbound campaigns, and it is published every quarter with the same method, so each edition can be compared with the last.

Four role families are covered: sales, cybersecurity, industrial automation and blue-collar trades (drivers, mechanics and fitters, electricians, welders and metalworkers, warehouse staff, production operatives). They are the families our clients sell into. This is not a census of the European labour market. It measures demand in those four families, in the countries where we searched for them.

A job advert is the unit throughout. One advert can carry several open seats, and the same seat can be advertised more than once, so advert counts are not vacancy counts.

Method

Sources. Three collections, all taken in Q3 2026:

The three collections held 68,303 rows before de-duplication. One source was left out entirely: a Polish scrape that stores one row per employer and search term, with the search term in the title field. Those rows are employer summaries, not adverts, and their titles cannot be checked.

De-duplication. Two passes. First on the Adzuna advert id, so the same Adzuna advert seen in two collections counts once. Then on country, employer name, title and location, compared after lower-casing and stripping accents, which catches the same advert on two sources and an employer relisting an identical role. A reworded repost survives both passes.

How roles are grouped. Every advert arrives with the search that found it. That search label is not a classification. Adzuna’s phrase search is loose, and a search for security returns guards, IT helpdesk roles, recruiters and teachers alongside security engineers. So each advert is also classified by its title, using a multilingual keyword list per family (for cybersecurity: cyber, security, sécurité, Sicherheit, bezpieczeństwo, beveiliging, SOC, SIEM, DevSecOps, pentest, IAM, GRC, CISO, RSSI). An advert counts in the index only when its title matches the family it was searched for. We call these verified adverts. The keyword lists and every query sit with the dataset, and the next section reports how many adverts failed the check.

Employer type. Each employer name is tagged as a direct employer, a staffing or recruitment agency, a job board, or unknown, by matching the name against a list of agency brands and generic terms (Personal, Zeitarbeit, recruitment, agencja pracy, uitzend and others) and a list of boards and public portals (Job-Room, France Travail, Centralna Baza Ofert Pracy and others). The lists catch the large and obvious names. A small agency with a neutral name is counted as a direct employer, so every agency share on this page is a floor.

Sector. Only for Poland, where our company index holds a sector for 734,565 registered companies. A Polish employer name is matched to the register after removing the legal form; only names that resolve to exactly one sector are used.

Headline findings

1. Search labels overstate demand. 52.2% of adverts returned by cybersecurity searches name a security function in the title. In Switzerland and the Netherlands the figure is 23.9%. Sales searches verify at 88.6% and blue-collar searches at 93.5%.
2. The UK and Germany lead sales hiring. Five identical English sales queries returned 5,540 postings in the United Kingdom and 5,274 in Germany on 9 September, against 224 in Austria.
3. Agencies dominate some niches. Staffing firms posted 54.7% of verified industrial-automation adverts in the Netherlands, 29.2% of sales adverts in Spain and 25.9% of cybersecurity adverts in the United Kingdom.
4. One advert in five is old. Of the 15,598 verified adverts live on 9 September, 20.3% had been posted more than 90 days earlier. 75.5% were posted in Q3.
5. Polish demand is industrial. Manufacturing and industry employers carry 1,051 of the 3,536 Polish adverts matched to a register sector, 29.7%, ahead of professional services at 15.9% and IT and software at 14.2%.

Adverts by country and role family

46,100 verified adverts, 40,037 of them posted by direct employers rather than agencies or boards. Those came from 22,367 employers, counting a group that hires in two countries once per country.

A dash means the family was not searched in that country. Estonia was searched for cybersecurity and returned no verified advert, which is why the index covers 11 countries with data out of 12 searched.

Read across a row with care. The country totals mostly reflect where we searched and how deep, not the size of each labour market. Germany leads because it is the only country where the blue-collar family drew on the Bundesagentur für Arbeit as well as Adzuna: of Germany’s 13,182 blue-collar adverts, 10,843 are for drivers. Compare countries inside one column, where the search was the same, and use the next two sections for cross-country demand.

Within blue-collar trades the two countries look different. Germany’s adverts are drivers first. Poland’s spread across mechanics and fitters (2,245), drivers (1,677), production operatives (1,214), welders and metalworkers (1,193), electricians (1,020) and warehouse staff (1,017).

Search labels are not job titles

Most published job-count figures report what a search returned. The check below shows how far that drifts from what employers actually advertised.

Cybersecurity is the weak family. Nearly half of what a security search returns is something else. In the United Kingdom alone, 41 of the adverts that failed the title check were school or teaching roles. The rate also swings by country, from 61.3% in Germany and 60.3% in the United Kingdom down to 47.3% in Poland and 23.9% in both Switzerland and the Netherlands. A headline that quotes raw search counts for Dutch or Swiss security jobs overstates them roughly fourfold.

Industrial automation drops furthest in Austria, where 38.5% of returned adverts verify; 169 of the 364 Austrian adverts match no role family at all. Sales holds up everywhere, from 75.2% in Switzerland to 93.2% in Germany.

Sales hiring by country

The sales pull is the one place where the same five English queries (sales development representative, SDR, business development representative, account executive, inside sales) ran in every country on the same day. Adzuna reports a total for each query before its 1,000-row download cap applies, so these totals are a fairer cross-country comparison than the downloaded rows.

The United Kingdom and Germany are close to level, and each carries about twice Spain’s volume. Poland, with 602, sits below Belgium. Two caveats: English-language queries favour the UK and markets where sales teams hire in English, and Adzuna’s coverage of national job boards differs by country. Treat the ordering as reliable and the gaps as approximate.

How much of the market is agencies

Share of verified adverts posted by a staffing or recruitment agency. Families first, then every country and family pair with at least 100 verified adverts, highest first.

The low blue-collar share does not mean agencies are absent from blue-collar hiring. Polish and German temporary-work agencies often trade under neutral names our list does not catch, so blue-collar agency shares are the most understated on this page. The high shares are the more reliable reading: a Dutch automation engineer advert is more likely than not to come from a detacheringsbureau, and a buyer list built from those adverts without removing agencies is half agency names.

How old the adverts are

Only the 9 September pull records a posting date for every advert, so this measure covers its two families, sales and industrial automation.

About half of what was live had been posted in the previous 30 days. The fifth that had been up for more than 90 days is either a hard-to-fill role, a role nobody took down, or an employer that keeps adverts open to collect candidates. For anyone using adverts as a buying signal, filtering to the last 30 days halves the list and removes most of the noise.

Which Polish sectors are hiring

Poland is the one country where our company index carries a sector for every registered company. 3,536 of the 9,593 verified Polish adverts from direct employers, 36.9%, matched a single register entry. 1,833 of 5,643 Polish employers matched.

Manufacturers lead, and they lead because of blue-collar hiring: 919 of their 1,051 matched adverts are blue-collar roles. Polish cybersecurity adverts come mostly from IT and software companies (259 matched adverts), which fits the pattern of security hiring inside software houses and IT service firms rather than at end users.

The match is by name, so it favours companies that advertise under their registered name. Large brands that advertise under a trading name (a retail chain, an international group) mostly fall out. The shares describe the matched third, not every Polish employer.

What this index cannot tell you

Growth. This is the first edition, and it has no earlier quarter to compare against. We cannot yet say which sectors or countries are growing. The Q4 2026 edition will be the first with a quarter-on-quarter change.

Week-over-week trend. The data comes from seven pull dates, and each date covers different families and countries. No family was pulled the same way on consecutive weeks, so a weekly series would measure our collection schedule, not the market.

Market size. Adzuna caps each query at 1,000 downloadable rows and does not index every national board or careers page. Every count here is a floor.

Vacancies. An advert is not a seat. One advert can cover several hires, and one hire can be advertised twice under different wording.

Classification error. Title keywords and name lists are rules, not judgement. They miss some real roles and let some wrong ones through, and the agency list misses small agencies with neutral names.

Figures in this index can differ from our earlier single-topic pages, such as the September sales-team page, because the index applies one title rule and one de-duplication across every collection.

How to cite and download

Download the index as CSV (aggregates only). One row per role family and country, with adverts returned, title-verified adverts, the split by employer type, distinct direct employers and posting-date counts, plus one row per Polish register sector. It holds no advert text, no URLs and no names of people. The family and country rows sum to the totals on this page.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Reuse, chart and republish it, with a credit and a link.

Suggested citation: Ripe Leads (2026). European Hiring Signal Index, Q3 2026. ripeleads.eu/resources/european-hiring-signal-index-q3-2026. Data pulled 17 July to 9 September 2026.

Journalists and researchers who need a cut the CSV does not carry, for example one country’s adverts by city, can write to info@ripeleads.eu. The Q4 2026 edition is planned for January 2027.