RTL Today recently explored an ongoing and much-discussed question in Luxembourg: the employment market. On one hand, reports of talent shortages. On the other, record unemployment. Senior recruiters we spoke to unanimously agreed that with plenty of qualified job seekers in the market, the crisis was not a true talent shortage, but a mismatch.
Meanwhile, troubling hiring practices such as ghosting and long wait times increase jobseeker frustration and anxiety, while stats on the number of people who leave Luxembourg in less than five years started to inspire further debate.
This isn’t a small problem either: As of February 2026 national employment agency ADEM has listed a total of 21,038 job seekers (10,234 of whom are on unemployment benefits) and 6,810 job vacancies. This marks an 8% job seeker increase compared to the previous year.
The playing field has drastically changed, too: from a post-COVID boom to record unemployment to a new demand to attract talent while thousands here still seek work. Such a complex situation, several experts and enterprising businesses in Luxembourg agree, needs creative solutions.
One thing that has changed according to someone who has been on the front lines of recruitment for 15 years is a shift: it was a candidate’s market before. Today, Bruno Van de Vloet said, it is very much an employer’s market.
“The number of open positions [after COVID] was much higher compared to the number of quality candidates available”, the Advisory Key CEO said. “The power was mainly in the candidates’ hands.”
Statistics from those post-COVID years show that while 2020 saw a loss of roughly 3.1 million workers in the EU, 2021 was marked by a rebound in hiring reaching over 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels by autumn 2021.
During this time, Van de Vloet, who has recruited thousands over his career, said that while companies were developing and aiming to fuel their growth with quality candidates, these quality candidates were hard to find.
But that’s since changed. “Since the middle of 2022, the economy started to slow down a bit due to different factors: the war in Ukraine, and now the war in Iran”, he said.
With geopolitical risk and the far-reaching effects of war, gas and petrol prices have increased and consequently, the rise of inflation and interest rates.
“And when the interest rates increase, it’s more complicated for a company to [be in debt]”, Van de Vloet said. “And we are now facing this situation: companies are not growing, or they are in a stagnant situation. They are a bit afraid about the future.”
Recruitment has become one of the factors affected. “In order to not take too many risks, they don’t want to recruit too many people because they might be in a position where the growth is not there, and they need to fire people.”
With other factors such as AI looming over hiring, the power has shifted from the hands of candidates to those of employers.
“And now, we have quality candidates available, but employers are not so keen to recruit them”, he concluded. “So, we really see that even good profiles can be unemployed today.”
All of the recruiters RTL Today spoke to both in this feature and the last agree: there isn’t a talent shortage in Luxembourg. Having identified the challenges that lead to a mismatch such as overuse of AI on both sides and long processing times, some recruitment experts have initiated platforms and new methods to tackle this.
One of these is RMT Lab’s new Skillbourg platform. Global CRO and Head of Recruitment at RMT Labs Killian Glendon concurred there is no talent shortage in Luxembourg, but an issue with the recruitment process and mindset – something their new initiative hopes to rectify.
What he has noticed is companies hiring out of direct response to a crucial need.
“When someone resigns – ‘Oh my gosh, panic, we need to find that person’”, he said. “But why are you even looking for the same person? That position has evolved, the company has evolved. [Are you hiring] just because you fill the need or is there a pain in the business or something needs fixing in the business?”
Another trend in Luxembourg: hiring with cost rather than development in mind. This leads to hiring cheaper junior candidates over more experienced and qualified individuals.
“Other countries go, what is the scope of work as to why we’re hiring,” he explained. “In Luxembourg, it seems to be the other way around. It’s very much, what is the cost?”
Elaborating further, he added that when hiring with a longer-term vision and strategic business development in mind, highly qualified employees are brought in to increase value – and that often comes with more senior candidates who bring experience.
“You’ve got the unemployment rate growing and it’s mainly 45 plus [years old] in Luxembourg, and they are the ones really wanting to work, gain and add value, gain and give 100%", he said. “And companies say, no, too old, overqualified, high risk of leaving in the next 18 months.”
“Who cares about 18 months?” he stressed. “You’ve had an issue for the last year, you’ve had this job reposted on LinkedIn and wherever else getting 100 applications a week, you’ve had your team bottlenecked, and here you have someone who could fit the role. So what is stopping you hiring that person?”
To test the market and thoroughly understand the challenges and complexities candidates face, Glendon deepened his market research by submitting over 80 job applications for roles he “was between 80% and 120% qualified for”.
For half his applications, Glendon received no response at all. For a quarter of the remaining half, he received automated responses “30 seconds after the application or two o’clock in the morning” which he attributes to bots filtering applications. And the other quarter was “you’re too senior, you’re overqualified, etcetera”, he said.
“So out of 80 applications, not one positive response.”
With research and insight grown over decades, RMT Labs has now launched Skillbourg, an initiative by Founder and CEO Daniel Stoica. Aiming to provide a more efficient, fair, and transparent recruitment experience for both employers and candidates, the platform collects applications and more information from candidates, then associates these profiles with suitable open positions.
While AI-powered, the human element is a high priority. “We want to show that going forward, it doesn’t matter what tech you have in the world”, Glendon said, “No tech will replace a human when it comes to recruitment.”
In a country as small as Luxembourg, the need to hire existing talent goes beyond value and unemployment rates; it’s a matter of infrastructure, too.
Richard Neale, Founder of LetzRecruit, said that Luxembourg’s infrastructure is struggling to keep up with the growing population, and this too needs to be a priority.
“It’s all very well saying we need to have 300,000 people coming by 2040, but I don’t know where they’re going to go, and how the infrastructure is going to support that”, said Neale, who has a history in recruitment spanning 20 years. “It’s not just the people, you’ve got to have the offices, schools, hospitals, roads, police.”
“And you’ve also got to think of the consequences if a market crash happens or something happens”, he added. “Potentially you’ve got 300,000 people, let’s just say 10% of those become unemployed, you’ve then got another 30,000 people signing up for unemployment benefits.”
When it comes to AI and recruitment, Neale highlighted the habit of word-matching and how AI could lead to lower quality applications on both sides.
On one hand, he said, candidates are using certain words far more often just to try to get through the initial AI screening process, so they can end up in front of a human and have an interview or a phone call.
Candidates might then think, “I’m not going to start putting together a CV that’s well-written, that demonstrates different skills because it might be identified as being too varied for an AI system”, he explained, “therefore, I’m going to try and use keywords, short, sharp, simple – the purpose of the CV then is nearly now becoming obsolete because it’s purely a word matching process for the AI system.”
What Neale aims to do with his platform LetzRecuit is to provide a safe job searching platform for those already here.
“I think at some point you’ve got to draw a line and say, let’s try and deal with what we’ve got now”, he said. “To actually put your resources and time and money into actually going to people and saying, how do we get you into the job? How do we retrain you to do different things?”
LetzRecruit facilitates being found rather than having to search. There, candidates can anonymously share their role, expectations, and ideal next step, staying discreet while exploring new opportunities and being contacted for roles that match.
With both platforms in their early days and the market still changing with its demand and supply, recruiters in Luxembourg continue to develop strategies and platforms in an effort to fix Luxembourg’s hiring problems.
But one upcoming law significantly changes things: an end to salary secrecy which comes into effect from June 2026.
“That’s the end of that awkward discussion”, said Glendon. “But it’s taken till 2026 for that to happen.”
