{"id":14588,"date":"2026-09-14T21:43:58","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elementapp.ai\/blog\/?p=14588"},"modified":"2026-09-14T21:43:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:43:58","slug":"poland-job-market-august-2026-grant-thornton-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elementapp.ai\/blog\/poland-job-market-august-2026-grant-thornton-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Job offers in Poland, August 2026: more ads, fewer jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Job offers in Poland, August 2026: more ads, fewer jobs<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In August 2026, employers posted 257,046 new job ads across the 50 largest recruitment portals in Poland, 4% more than a year earlier. It is the third consecutive month of year-over-year growth, and the increase covered all ten cities and all seven industries in the study. That is what the 74th edition of Grant Thornton’s report “Job Offers in Poland”<\/a> shows, with data collected by the Element<\/a> recruitment system. Over the same period, Statistics Poland (GUS) reports falling employment, and that gap is the core of my commentary in the report. The full report is a Polish-language PDF you can download at the end of this post. If you read Polish, there is also a Polish version of this article<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Key data from the report<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Employers published 257,046 ads in August, 10,112 more than in August 2025, when the portals recorded 246,934 offers. Year-over-year growth came in at 4%, up from 2% in July. The three-month rolling average, which best smooths out monthly swings, rose from 2% to 3%, its highest level since May 2025. Compared with July, offers fell by 18,577, or 7%, but that is a seasonal drop: a year ago the market lost even more between July and August, about 9%.<\/p>\n

Still, I don’t think this August looks impressive against earlier years. The result beats August 2025 (247,000) and pandemic-era 2020 (238,000), but it trails August 2019 and every August from 2021 through 2024, when the portals recorded between 284,000 and 318,000 new offers. The market is bouncing off a low base and still has a long way to go to get back to where it was two years ago. Grant Thornton points out that September will be key, since in previous years it brought a post-summer pickup.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Cities: all ten in positive territory<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In my post on the July edition of the report<\/a>, Gdansk was in negative territory, while Lodz and Bydgoszcz were flat. I wrote then that I would check in August whether those three cities would return to growth, and all of them did: Gdansk and Lodz grew 6% each, and Bydgoszcz 9%. Offers grew fastest in Wroclaw (+12%) and Krakow (+11%). Katowice (+2%) and Poznan (+4%) grew the slowest. Warsaw, with 40,266 ads, grew 5% and accounts for almost 16% of all new offers in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
City<\/th>New offers, Aug 2026<\/th>YoY change<\/th>Offers per 1,000 residents<\/th><\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Warsaw<\/td>40,266<\/td>+5%<\/td>21.6<\/td><\/tr>\n
Krakow<\/td>17,335<\/td>+11%<\/td>21.5<\/td><\/tr>\n
Wroclaw<\/td>13,342<\/td>+12%<\/td>19.8<\/td><\/tr>\n
Gdansk<\/td>9,875<\/td>+6%<\/td>20.2<\/td><\/tr>\n
Poznan<\/td>8,861<\/td>+4%<\/td>16.5<\/td><\/tr>\n
Katowice<\/td>6,353<\/td>+2%<\/td>22.8<\/td><\/tr>\n
Lodz<\/td>5,325<\/td>+6%<\/td>8.2<\/td><\/tr>\n
Szczecin<\/td>4,355<\/td>+8%<\/td>11.2<\/td><\/tr>\n
Lublin<\/td>3,779<\/td>+9%<\/td>11.5<\/td><\/tr>\n
Bydgoszcz<\/td>3,369<\/td>+9%<\/td>10.4<\/td><\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Per thousand residents, the ten largest cities averaged 16.4 offers, down from 17.8 in July. Katowice leads with 22.8, ahead of Warsaw at 21.6 and Krakow at 21.5. Lodz is at the bottom again with 8.2 offers per thousand people, even though the number of ads there rose by 6%.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Industries: healthcare grows fastest, IT returns to growth<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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All seven industries grew year over year. Healthcare leads again, this time with 18% growth, as the number of offers rose from 2,770 to 3,260. Employers looked for doctors in 1,984 ads, 19% more often than a year ago, for nurses in 1,065 (+17%) and for paramedics in 172 (+19%). IT, which was exactly flat in July, is growing again at 5%, and offers for programmers rose from 1,152 to 1,211.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Industry<\/th>Aug 2025<\/th>Aug 2026<\/th>YoY change<\/th><\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Healthcare<\/td>2,770<\/td>3,260<\/td>+18%<\/td><\/tr>\n
Finance<\/td>2,223<\/td>2,384<\/td>+7%<\/td><\/tr>\n
Marketing \/ Sales<\/td>1,114<\/td>1,180<\/td>+6%<\/td><\/tr>\n
IT<\/td>1,437<\/td>1,514<\/td>+5%<\/td><\/tr>\n
HR<\/td>918<\/td>955<\/td>+4%<\/td><\/tr>\n
Legal<\/td>305<\/td>312<\/td>+2%<\/td><\/tr>\n
Blue-collar<\/td>20,523<\/td>20,976<\/td>+2%<\/td><\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Blue-collar work is still the largest group, with 20,976 offers, but together with legal it is growing the slowest, at 2%. Employers looked for drivers in 9,107 ads (+3%), warehouse workers in 3,923 (+4%), and cashiers and sales assistants in 6,865 (+1%). Of the 28 positions covered in the report, only one declined: offers for security guards fell by 3%, from 1,117 to 1,081. Five were flat, including CFO, IT director and tax advisor. Recruiters were sought in 189 ads, 5% more often than a year earlier.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Benefits and requirements: training is clearly in retreat<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The average number of benefits per offer fell to 5.4 from 5.6 in July. That is a low reading compared with several previous years, when the figure was well above six. A medical package appears in 57% of offers, a sports package in 56%, high pay in 28% and flexible working hours in 22%.<\/p>\n

The training figures are the most telling, though. Today 48% of ads promise training. In August 2025 the figure was 65%, and in August 2023 and 2024 it was 84%, so the share has dropped by 36 percentage points in two years. This part of the report is based on a random sample of 1,000 offers from Pracuj.pl and OLX, so I would treat a two- or three-point change in a single month with caution. A fall from 84% to 48%, however, is in my view a trend that sampling error cannot explain.<\/p>\n

There are fewer requirements too: 4.7 per offer, compared with 4.8 in July. Professional experience is expected by 59% of employers (65% in July), education by 50% (52%), availability by 32% (29%) and foreign-language skills by 28% (25%). On its own, a six-point drop in expected experience within a month would look like good news for juniors. I’m not so sure it is, since the same sample shows companies promising training less and less often.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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My take: AI is taking work away from juniors<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In my commentary for the report, I set the growth in job offers against employment data. According to Statistics Poland<\/a> (in Polish), average employment in the enterprise sector was 0.8% lower in July than a year earlier. Preliminary data from Poland’s Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Policy, as reported by Bankier.pl<\/a> (in Polish), show 911,000 people registered as unemployed in August, 54,700 more than a year before, with the unemployment rate up to 5.9%. Given that job offers rose by 4% over the same period, the question I raise is whether more ads alongside lower employment mostly reflect turnover, with companies refilling positions vacated by people who left.<\/p>\n

I am not certain about that. Grant Thornton notes in the report that job offers run about two months ahead of GUS employment data, because recruitment and a notice period sit between a job ad and a first day at work. If the June and July growth in offers turns into jobs, we will see it in the GUS readings this fall. If it does not, turnover becomes the simplest explanation.<\/p>\n

The second signal is that job offers are getting leaner. Fewer benefits, and training promised in fewer than half of ads compared with more than 80% a few years ago, are bad news for juniors, since companies are giving up on investing in people. This brings me back to a topic I have written about many times on this blog: things keep getting harder for people entering the job market, and plenty of data confirms that AI is taking over the simple tasks juniors used to start with. Fresh numbers on this came out in August from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab<\/a>. A revised version of the study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, based on ADP payroll data, shows that employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed occupations is now about 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with peers in less exposed occupations. A year earlier, the gap was 15%.<\/p>\n

The authors caution that they are describing patterns, not causal estimates, and that they see no widespread, economy-wide displacement of workers. What matters more to me is how, in their reading, the gap forms: mainly through companies hiring fewer young people rather than through more layoffs. In my commentary on the July report, I asked to what extent AI, cited as a reason for layoffs in the US, was a real cause and to what extent an excuse. In August, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas<\/a>, AI fell from first to fourth place among the reasons, with 3,462 of 52,881 announced cuts, ending a five-month run at the top. Year to date, it still leads, with 116,175 cuts. In my view, that explains why both readings can be true at once: a job nobody was hired into does not show up in any layoff report.<\/p>\n

Nor is there any comfort in what is happening with interest rates and oil. The European Central Bank raised interest rates by 25 basis points on September 10<\/a>, bringing the deposit rate to 2.50% effective September 16. The Fed announces its decision on September 16, and some economists expect its first hike since July 2023. A barrel of Brent crude cost about $106<\/a> on September 14. Accordingly, there will be no cheap capital for hiring.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Download the report<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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You can download the full report, “Job Offers in Poland. Edition LXXIV: August 2026,” with commentary from Magdalena Marcinowska (Grant Thornton) and me, below. Note: the report itself is written in Polish only.<\/p>\n

Download the report (PDF, in Polish)<\/a><\/p>\n

The report includes:<\/p>\n