Presented at HR Tech Europe 2026 | April 23th 2026
By Geert-Jan Waasdorp, Intelligence Group
The world of talent is moving faster than most organisations can follow. At HR Tech Europe, I shared five trends that are not distant projections, but trends that are already happening. Backed by data from Intelligence Group, years of listening to candidates, and looking at labor markets across Europe, these shifts are fundamentally changing how talent finds work, how employers attract it, and how HR professionals make sense of it all.
Forget for a moment about AI writing CVs or generating cover letters. That is the old story. The real shift is this: candidates are now using AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others) to actively search for jobs. Not as a novelty, but as a primary channel.
Our Dutch data shows that in 2024, around 6% of job seekers were already using AI as part of their job search. By 2025, that figure had risen to 10.8% on average, with master-educated candidates reaching nearly 13%. Across Europe, countries like Croatia, the United Kingdom and Germany are already seeing AI adoption in job changes exceeding 12–13%. Romania and Finland sit at the lower end, but the direction is the same everywhere: sharply upward.
In high-adoption sectors, the numbers are even more striking. In IT & Automation and Marketing & Communications, roughly one in five people changing jobs is already using AI to find their next role. This is not a future scenario. It is today’s reality for a significant and growing part of the talent market.
Within 18 months, we expect AI to be a top-3 online job search channel for candidates who use the internet to find work. That is a structural disruption for the entire recruitment ecosystem.
What makes this more than a volume shift is the quality of the matching it enables. Traditional skills-based matching (comparing keywords on a CV to keywords in a job description) is rapidly becoming obsolete. AI-powered job search agents look at preferences, context, values, working style, and dozens of other signals simultaneously. The matching is holistic in a way that skills-based approaches have never managed to be. In short: skills-based matching is old school compared to what AI can already do today.
If AI is becoming a top job search channel, then the question for every employer becomes: will AI recommend us?
This is the logic behind GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). Just as SEO was about being found by Google, GEO is about being found and cited by large language models. When a candidate asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend the best employers for engineers in their country, your organisation either appears in the answer or it does not. There is no page 2.
To rank well in AI-generated results, employers need to rethink their digital presence. The key principles are:
The good news: most of what makes a strong GEO strategy is an extension of what good employer branding has always required: be clear, be authentic, be present in the right places. The difference is that the audience is now partly machine.
The challenge in recruitment and HR has never been a lack of data. Organisations are swimming in it. Every interview, every exit conversation, every video, every candidate interaction, every job posting: all of it is data. The real problem has always been extraction, combination, and activation.
Consider what exists within a typical organisation alone: ATS and CRM data, VMS records, career site analytics, HRIS files, payroll data, internal surveys, L&D systems, collaboration tools. And externally: national labour statistics, job board trend data, LinkedIn signals, commercial talent intelligence platforms, salary benchmarks, and much more.
Most organisations use Power BI or similar dashboarding tools to try to make sense of a fraction of this. That model is becoming outdated. The question is no longer how to visualise data; it is how to connect it and get answers from it directly.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the infrastructure shift that makes the data promise real.
Developed by Anthropic and released as open source, MCP is a protocol that allows AI systems to connect directly to data sources: your ATS, your VMS, your HR platform, your internal knowledge base, your external intelligence feeds. The result is that instead of clicking through dashboards and pulling reports, professionals can simply ask questions and receive answers synthesised across all their connected sources.
At HR Tech Europe, we demonstrated exactly this: using our own Intelligence Group MCP, connected to the Giant platform, a user can ask a question like “Give me talent insights and a comparison of software developers in France, Germany and the United Kingdom where can I best recruit them?” and receive a structured, data-rich answer within seconds, drawn from real market intelligence across all three regions. No dashboarding. No manual analysis. Just the answer.
If your ATS or HR system provider does not yet offer an MCP server or API access, ask for it. The organisations that get ahead of this will have a serious analytical advantage within the next 12–24 months.
Talent shortages get discussed constantly in the context of AI specialists, data engineers and cloud architects. Those shortages are real. But the shortage that is accelerating fastest and attracting the least strategic attention is the one in blue-collar and frontline roles.
Since the Lisbon Strategy of 2003, European policy has deliberately invested in building a knowledge economy, driving up bachelor and master graduation rates. It worked. Today, over 36% of the EU-27 workforce holds a degree, and the number entering the labour market with higher education continues to grow. In the Netherlands, it is already above 60%.
The flip side: the outflow from the labour market (those retiring) is disproportionately made up of people with practical, vocational and craft-based education. The inflow to replace them is insufficient. Every year, this structural gap between supply and demand in skilled trades, logistics, manufacturing and healthcare grows wider.
When looking at skills, the same logic applies: do not focus only on what is most in demand today. Focus on what is growing fastest. The skills that barely appeared in job postings five years ago but are now mentioned frequently: those are the leading indicators of where the market is heading. That is where the talent strategy needs to point.
candidates find work, which forces employers to rethink how they are found (GEO), which requires treating every piece of content and interaction as strategic data, which demands the infrastructure (MCP) to actually use that data, all against a backdrop of a structurally tightening labour market.
The organisations that understand this as a system, and not as five separate HR technology topics, will be better positioned to attract, retain and develop the talent they need.
Geert-Jan Waasdorp is founder of Intelligence Group and one of Europe’s leading labour market analysts. For more data and insights, visit giant.ai or connect via LinkedIn.
