Poland's job market: 238,000 offers and the specter of jobless recovery
In February 2026, employers posted 238,412 new job ads across the 50 largest recruitment portals in Poland, which is 7% less than a year earlier and 6% less than in January. This marks the ninth consecutive month of year-over-year decline. The latest (69th) edition of the Grant Thornton report “Job Offers in Poland,” prepared in partnership with Element as the technology partner, confirms what many of us feel: the labor market is freezing up, even though GDP is projected to grow by 4%. Below are the key data from the report and my extended commentary on what lies behind the numbers. Note: the full report is available in Polish only.
Key data from the report
238,000 new job offers represent a 7% year-over-year decline and a 6% drop compared to January, with the three-month rolling average holding at -7%. Early 2025 looked promising, as the dynamics were positive and the market showed signs of recovery, but the second half of the year brought a pronounced cooling that persists to this day.
There is one positive signal: the declines have stopped deepening. As the report puts it, the market “bounced off the bottom,” but quickly adds that there is no indication it will “resurface” any time soon. The current level of job postings is one of the weakest in the six-year history of the study, comparable to the results from 2021 and 2024.
Cities: declines across the board
Not a single one of the ten cities surveyed recorded year-over-year growth. Warsaw remains in the lead with 38,600 offers, but even the capital saw a 6% decline, while Krakow (15,700, -4%) and Wroclaw (11,300, -7%) follow close behind.
| City | New offers (thousands) | YoY change | Offers per 1,000 residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warsaw | 38.6 | -6% | 20.7 |
| Krakow | 15.7 | -4% | 19.5 |
| Wroclaw | 11.3 | -7% | 16.7 |
| Gdansk | 9.8 | -8% | 20.2 |
| Katowice | 9.0 | -9% | 20.8 |
| Poznan | 5.8 | -9% | 16.7 |
| Lodz | 4.4 | -8% | 6.8 |
| Szczecin | 4.1 | -6% | 10.5 |
| Lublin | 3.3 | -4% | 10.0 |
| Bydgoszcz | 3.1 | -6% | 9.6 |
Manufacturing-dependent cities are hit hardest. Katowice (-9%) and Bydgoszcz (-6%) are absorbing the shockwaves from the German automotive crisis. At the bottom of the table sits Lodz, with just 6.8 offers per thousand residents, three times fewer than Katowice or Warsaw.
Industries: healthcare is the only green light
Healthcare (+5%) is the only sector with positive dynamics. Demand for doctors rose by 7% and for paramedics by 5%, driven by chronic staffing shortages and an aging population. In this sector, AI remains a support tool, not a replacement.
| Industry | YoY dynamics | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | +5% | Staff shortages that AI cannot fix |
| HR | -3% | Less turnover means fewer hires |
| Finance | -4% | Back-office increasingly automated |
| Marketing / Sales | -5% | Companies cutting budgets |
| IT | -6% | Fewer developers, more AI specialists |
| Blue-collar | -7% | Spillover from German automotive |
| Legal | -9% | LLMs taking over document work |
Among blue-collar workers, warehouse staff saw a 14% decline and security personnel 7%, as supply chains slow down and logistics becomes increasingly automated. In IT (-6%), “role collapse” is most visible: demand for programmers dropped by 7%, but at the same time demand for AI and cybersecurity specialists is growing.
Benefits are back to pandemic levels
The average number of benefits per job offer has fallen to 5.6, which is back to where it was at the start of the pandemic. Employers are keeping what they consider essential: medical packages (62%), sports packages (59%), and training (52%), while the rest is being cut.
Free fruit (12%), chill zones (8%), and language lessons (19%) have clearly lost their appeal. For comparison, in 2022, training was offered by 82% of employers and sports packages by 70%. Back then, the employee-driven market forced companies to compete on benefits, but today employers no longer need to entice candidates because they know the supply is ample.
Among requirements, professional experience (62%) has overtaken education (53%), and demand for foreign language skills holds steady at 32%.
My commentary: why the market is freezing
That is what the report data tells us. Below is my analysis of what is driving these numbers. As CEO of Element and the technology partner behind this study, I have spent years looking not just at the charts but at what is actually happening inside the companies that hire.
Jobless recovery, Polish edition
238,000 job offers alongside a projected 4% GDP growth is a juxtaposition that speaks for itself: the economy is growing, but jobs are not keeping up. Wage growth is decelerating from double digits to a projected 5.5%, which confirms that the era of employers outbidding each other for candidates is coming to an end.
But I am not sure this is a full-blown “jobless recovery” just yet. I run training sessions on AI adoption in recruitment and HR, and what I see is that the vast majority of companies are only just beginning to automate their processes. Awareness of AI capabilities is rising, but real production deployments remain rare. The full-scale technological transformation of the labor market is still in its infancy.
Germany is dragging Poland down
The German economy, on which Polish manufacturing is heavily dependent, is in a state of fragile recovery. The Ifo index rose in February 2026 to 88.6 points, which beat expectations but is still far from optimistic. The automotive sector, with a sentiment index of -15.6 points, remains close to depression, and modest improvements in electromobility do not change that picture.
This directly impacts Polish manufacturing centers. It shows up in the data for Bydgoszcz and Katowice, where job offers have been declining for months. The 7% drop in the blue-collar category is largely a consequence of what is happening across the Oder River.
US: a frozen market
The US labor market shows similar symptoms of stagnation. Job openings (JOLTS) rose in January 2026 to 6.9 million, but the quits rate fell to 1.8%, the lowest since 2020. People are afraid to switch jobs, which in turn discourages companies from opening new recruitment processes.
In early 2026, the American tech sector announced over 45,000 layoffs. Amazon cut 16,000 positions, Block let go of 40% of its workforce, and Oracle is laying off thousands to fund its AI data center expansion. These companies are not posting losses; they are simply redirecting capital from people to machines.
On top of that, February 2026 brought deteriorating sentiment due to the Iran-US conflict, and the University of Michigan consumer confidence index dropped to 55.5 points. Rising energy costs and geopolitical uncertainty are acting as additional brakes on labor markets on both sides of the Atlantic.
Interest rates: the central bank is easing, but slowly
Poland’s Monetary Policy Council cut the reference rate by 25 basis points to 3.75% in March 2026, and CPI inflation fell to 2.2% in January, below the central bank’s target. But the monetary transmission mechanism operates with a lag, and companies are still paying down debts incurred at much higher capital costs, so they are in no rush to hire.
The decline in inflation is partly driven by weakening domestic demand and wage stabilization. For HR directors, this means the end of the salary bidding wars, but it also forces a search for efficiency through automation rather than through growing headcount.
AI and "role collapse"
Gartner estimates that AI significantly reshapes 32 million jobs per year worldwide. In Poland, this is visible in IT and professional services. “Role collapse” means that AI-powered agents and generative tools enable senior specialists to absorb the responsibilities that previously required entire support teams.
For example, a senior software engineer can now use AI to handle business analysis and product management tasks on their own, which eliminates the need to fill those positions with separate hires. This is why demand for programmers dropped by 7% year-over-year, while demand is growing for specialists who can effectively orchestrate work with AI.
Closed doors for juniors
The share of job offers aimed at people with no experience has fallen to 5.3%, down from 8% just two years ago, and companies have stopped treating juniors as an investment. From a CFO’s perspective, the math is simple: AI does not get sick, does not quit after six months, and does not require training from scratch, so it is cheaper to pay more for an experienced specialist equipped with AI tools than to mentor a newcomer for half a year.
I consider this short-sighted. In 3-4 years it will come back as a massive skills gap. But at current labor costs and with a rising minimum wage, this argument loses in boardroom discussions.
The push back to the office
84% of CEOs plan to end full remote work by 2027. In 2026, the hybrid model (2 days in the office, 3 remote) is becoming the standard, but it is a standard imposed from above rather than negotiated. Employees value flexibility, but bargaining power has shifted to the employer side, and there is less and less room for resistance.
What comes next
The data, showing solid GDP growth that is not generating new jobs, suggests the onset of a “jobless recovery” phase. Although the statistics point to a structural cooling of demand and a 7% year-over-year decline in job offers, I personally am not sure this is the moment. My experience running training sessions shows that we are only at the very beginning of the road to automating processes and building real awareness of AI’s role in business. “Role collapse” and the displacement of juniors by technology are facts, but their full scale is still ahead of us. The current stagnation is more likely a ricochet from German industrial problems and corporate caution in the face of high capital costs. While employers have regained their bargaining power, cutting benefits to pandemic-era levels, I believe the true technological transformation of the labor market is still in its infancy.
Maciej Michalewski, CEO Element
The “employee’s market” of 2021-2022 is not coming back. 238,000 offers per month is the new normal, and companies that invest in AI-upskilling their existing workforce instead of fighting for scarce external talent will have the advantage. Poland is becoming a market where you do not look for “hands to work” but for “minds to manage technology.”
The current stagnation is not a temporary dip. It looks like the beginning of a shift where the ability to work alongside algorithms is becoming the deciding factor in whether someone keeps their place on the payroll.
The full report “Job Offers in Poland. Edition LXIX: February 2026” is available (in Polish) on the Grant Thornton website.
Sources:
- Grant Thornton, Oferty pracy w Polsce. Monitoring procesow rekrutacyjnych. Edition LXIX: February 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, January 2026.
- Ifo Institute, Business Climate German Automotive Industry, February 2026.
- National Bank of Poland, Monetary Policy Council, March 2026.
- Gartner Research, AI impact on white-collar jobs 2026.
- No Fluff Jobs, Polish IT labor market 2025/2026.
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Maciej Michalewski
CEO @ Element. Recruitment Automation Software
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