New analysis shows nearly half of all job vacancies in Northern Ireland are now “hard to fill”.
Northern Ireland’s labour market is showing signs of mounting pressure. Unemployment remains extremely low at 2.4%, yet employers are increasingly struggling to fill roles across key sectors — including skilled trades, professional services, care, logistics and operational roles.
This points to a widening disconnect: Northern Ireland doesn’t lack talent, it lacks talent reaching the right roles. That’s the verdict from Oleeo, the AI-powered recruitment platform used across major global public and private sector organisations, which has analysed the UK Government’s newly published Employer Skills Survey (November 2025; 72,000+ employer establishments) to understand where regions are under the greatest pressure.
despite Northern Ireland having a much smaller labour market, employers face recruitment challenges at a similar, or greater intensity than larger UK regions.
This suggests a more structural issue:
- Employers are not struggling due to a lack of job seekers
- They are struggling to reach, filter and identify suitable candidates quickly enough
- The bottleneck lies less in labour supply and more in recruitment processes and applicant suitability.
Charles Hipps, Founder & CEO, Oleeo says:
“Northern Ireland is facing a vacancy pressure that is increasingly a productivity problem. With 43% of roles hard to fill, employers are managing high applicant volume but low suitability. Without modern attraction and screening tools — from job adverts that target the right talent to AI that surfaces strong candidates fairly and accurately — employers simply cannot hire at the speed they need.”
Vacancy strain is not limited to specialist professions. Northern Ireland shows high vacancy density in:
- Professional roles (7.9%) — nearly double the UK average
- Skilled trades (4.6%)
- Associate professional roles (4.6%)
- Administrative roles (3.6%), significantly above the UK average of 2.0%
While Northern Ireland has fewer managerial vacancies overall, the proportion of unfilled roles is significantly higher in skilled trades, professional roles, administrative positions and associate professions. This shows that recruitment pressure is concentrated not just in specialist sectors, but across the roles that keep services, infrastructure and industry running.
Notably, vacancy density in professional roles sits at 7.9%, almost double the UK average — signalling acute demand for technical and knowledge-based workers. Administrative vacancies are also nearly twice the UK rate, pointing to a growing strain in essential operational support functions.
Together, these figures highlight a broader imbalance: demand is rising for hands-on and mid-skilled professional workers, but supply is not keeping pace. At the same time, application volumes for office-based roles continue to increase, fuelled by AI-generated CVs and shifting jobseeker behaviour. Employers are becoming overwhelmed in some pipelines while struggling to find suitable candidates in others.
If this mismatch continues, it could impact productivity and the delivery of public services across Northern Ireland in the year ahead.
The data shows a clear pattern: Northern Ireland’s hiring challenges stem less from a lack of people applying, and far more from employers struggling to identify the right candidates. Only 27% of Northern Ireland’s hard-to-fill vacancies are due to missing skills, meaning 73% are driven by other barriers — including poor applicant fit, low interest in specific roles, limited applicant volume in certain sectors, or recruitment processes that cannot filter and prioritise effectively.
Employers in Northern Ireland are just as likely to cite issues with applicant quality and suitability (47%) as they are with applicant quantity (also 47%). This dual pressure highlights a structural imbalance: some roles attract too few candidates, others attract too many — but neither group delivers the right match consistently.
As application volumes rise, fuelled by economic shifts and the ease of submitting CVs digitally, strong candidates are increasingly being missed simply because hiring teams cannot manually screen and assess applications at scale. The challenge is therefore not just attracting talent, but ensuring good candidates are surfaced quickly and fairly.
This pattern mirrors what Oleeo sees across the wider UK public sector. Organisations using Oleeo’s technology to modernise filtering and assessment have already seen measurable improvements. In one major UK Government department with staff operating across Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, AI-supported screening led to:
- 30% improvement in shortlisting accuracy
- 29% increase in diversity
- 50% reduction in screening time
These gains allowed hiring teams to progress suitable candidates weeks faster, while maintaining fairness, consistency and human oversight.
Charles Hipps concludes:
“Northern Ireland has the talent — but employers need better tools to find it. The biggest barrier isn’t a lack of applicants; it’s a lack of modern processes that help surface genuine potential. When organisations can reduce noise, engage candidates earlier and identify suitability with confidence, everyone benefits — employers, jobseekers and the wider economy.”