Europe 2015–2025: from unemployment to the matching problem
Over a decade, Europe’s labour market became much stronger in headline statistics. Yet workers and companies still describe difficulty finding the right counterpart. KAYROMA data suggests the problem increasingly concerns matching rather than the simple absence of jobs or people.
A decade ago, unemployment was one of the central problems of the European labour market. Today the indicators are clearly better, yet finding the right job and the right employee can still be difficult. This apparent contradiction is the starting point of this analysis.
The market changed fundamentally
According to Eurostat, the unemployment rate in the EU-28 was 9.4% in 2015. In 2025, for the current EU composition, it was 6.0%. Over the same period, the employment rate of people aged 20–64 rose from 70.1% in 2015 to a record 76.1% in 2025.
The comparison is not between identical EU compositions because Brexit changed membership, but the direction is clear: Europe moved from a period of high unemployment toward much higher employment and increasingly reported labour and skills shortages.
A labour shortage does not mean that people do not exist
The European Commission says labour and skills shortages increased across Member States for almost a decade. In 2024 it identified 42 EU-wide shortage occupations, while nearly two thirds of small and medium-sized enterprises said they could not find the talent they needed.
This changes the perspective. If economies create jobs, companies report vacancies and people still report difficulty finding work, the problem cannot be explained only by the number of available jobs.
What the KAYROMA survey shows
In the KAYROMA study, the average rating for difficulty finding work was 5.5/10, while 37% of participants who answered this question rated the difficulty at 7–10.
This does not mean that the entire European labour market experiences the problem to the same extent. The KAYROMA result should be read as an observation from study participants: even during record-high employment, part of the active workforce describes finding the right job as difficult.
The employer subset is too small for representative indicators, but the direction is consistent with broader European evidence: responses include high recruitment-difficulty scores, long search times and technical or specialist occupations named as particularly hard to fill.
From a vacancy market to a matching market
Traditional job portals mainly solved an information-access problem: publish a vacancy and let a candidate find it. Today the market is more complex. One person may consider several countries, several forms of cooperation and several related occupations. A company may search across borders while requiring a specific language, availability, certification and experience.
The existence of a vacancy and a candidate therefore does not guarantee a match. What matters increasingly is the fit between profession, specialisation, country, relocation readiness, language, cooperation model, qualifications and the moment when both sides are actually available.
KAYROMA Research conclusion
Macroeconomic data shows that Europe made a major move toward high employment over the decade. KAYROMA data shows at the same time that better headline statistics have not eliminated the friction experienced by people inside recruitment processes.
Our research hypothesis is therefore that a growing part of Europe’s labour-market problem is moving from a lack of opportunities toward imperfect matching between opportunities that already exist and people who already exist. Further KAYROMA analyses will test that hypothesis from different angles.
Digital recruitment: more information, more places to search Go to analysis 02