Ukrainian Tech Hiring Volume Comparative Analysis Dec. 2025

So the last time we talked about Ukrainian tech hiring trends and what affects them. This time let’s take a closer look at lots of numbers regarding hiring volume.

This is a collection of data we’ve gathered from our partner companies. It outlines the hiring volume dynamics as of December 2025 compared to December 2024. Sample size is 5-6 companies per niche.

If you want full analysis – contact us.

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Hiring Volume Analysis December 2025

Traditional IT Outsourcing

55% fewer Senior / Lead hires

Outsourcing is having it real bad these days. Turns out with such wide variety of cookie cutter boilerplate solutions – no one needs a quick fix and a large scale projects don’t come in every quarter.

As a result, hiring copious amounts of senior talent became unsustainable and the focus shifted towards more cost-effective approaches.

If there is a need to have more senior talent – at this point it is more cost-effective to do some internal recruitment and provide upskilling to get the job done.

25% more Junior / Middle hires

Hiring junior and middle talent is always a solution for something. It is a more cost-efficient approach and the ability to cultivate loyalty through career growth.

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 20%

Product Development

35% fewer Senior hires

Senior talent costs a lot of money. That’s it. Seriously.

Hiring away a senior engineer is at least 30% increase over median salary.

• And let’s be honest – it is probably 50% and upwards. Can’t blame them – why bother if the money ain’t right.

A solution from the company’s perspective is simple:

• on the one hand, you can cultivate seniors from middle-level specialists
• on the other hand, you can partially replace expensive long-tenured seniors with middle-level specialists at roughly half the cost. Capitalism!

60% fewer Lead hires

Lead talent is always at such a weird place. Everybody wants them. No one really wants to deal with them.

Here’s why:

• External Lead hiring is extremely expensive.
  • Salary growth between jobs can reach up to 65% due to retention attempts and competing offers.
• If you have proper talent development infrastructure, you only need to hire a quarter of lead talent from outside. And you can nurture the rest from your senior staff.
  • Internal recruitment and upskilling is more cost-efficient and that drives the external recruitment decrease.
  • The key factor is leadership pipeline development. If the company can afford that, they can afford hiring less lead talent from outside.

25% more Middle hires

Middle talent is a safe bet. It is a good thing when business is going strong. However, when the market is as volatile as it is today – it is a lifeline.

• Hiring middle-level specialists are significantly more cost-efficient than headhunting senior talent.

Investing in middle talent is also a good idea because the nurturing talent all the way is a sign of organizational maturity.

• Because of that, companies maintain interest in long-term talent cultivation through structured career development.
• That doesn’t mean all of them have figured out their methods of doing that, but they’re doing something. That gotta count, innit?

15% more Junior hires

Same thing goes for juniors. But there’s a catch.

Juniors need more nurturing. That might be too much for some companies.

• The shift towards enterprise-style organizational models means juniors either have a specific place in company or have no place at all.

As a result, the interest is comparably limited but stable. Skill barriers and constrained mentoring capacity limit large-scale junior hiring.

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 30%

SaaS & Enterprise

45% fewer Senior hires

Similar to the broader product segment, the focus is on retention and internal recruitment.

• Senior hiring is gradually shifting from mass recruitment to targeted hiring via networks and LinkedIn.

Given salary levels and expectations, mass senior recruitment has become a high-risk strategy.

50% fewer Lead hires

In most cases, investing in upskilling existing employees is more efficient than competing for overvalued external candidates.

When external Lead hiring does occur, it is an extremely costly role to fill.

• Expect 50% salary increase on the offer and that might not even end up with the hiring success.

10% more Middle hires

Limited middle talent hiring volume growth reflects limited project scaling – at this point SaaS projects are primarily filling gaps rather than expanding teams.

20% more Junior hires

Enterprise and SaaS infrastructures allow for systematic junior training in controlled environments, where juniors can contribute without causing critical operational risks.

As a result, hiring junior is both cost-efficient and workflow efficient.

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 25%

AI Products & Startups

20% more Senior hires

Senior talent hiring volume growth is largely driven by organizational structures that allow situational reformatting after the product foundation has been established, enabling gradual team scaling.

25% more Lead hires

Compared to other niches, overall Lead hiring volumes remain relatively small and are mostly point-based.

• However, lead-level poaching between companies is present, particularly among Product Managers.

15% more Middle hires

Similar to SaaS, AI project infrastructures support gradual skill development and deeper specialization based on current needs.

10% fewer Junior hires

Skill barriers play a major role.

Juniors require long adaptation periods, which are complicated by the dynamic nature of AI teams and processes.

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 10%

Fintech & Banking

30% more Senior hires

Senior hiring volume growth is driven by demand for specialists with deep domain expertise in different fintech and banking domains, particularly in security and system integrations.

15% more Lead hires

Leads are expensive. The fintech niche got not that many of them. That’s a problem with no functional solution.

As a result, companies get creative.

• Some needs are covered internally.
• The external hiring is typically required for integrating new solutions or shifting product paradigms.
• At the lead level, companies usually aim to balance internal and external recruitment, which strongly supports long-term retention.

10% more Middle hires, 15% more Junior hires

Middle and junior talent hiring volume growth remains limited due to non-competitive compensation compared to other sectors.

• Narrow domain expertise results in lower salary bands, creating a significant barrier to candidate interest.
• Non-systematic approaches to career development and upskilling further constrain middle-level hiring.

The minimal growth also coincides with reduced tenure lengths in banking/fintech companies.

• According to our annual Ukrainian tech segment research survey – average tenure shifted from 1–2 years to 9–12 months.
• This insight suggests that growth may largely reflect backfilling rather than expansion.

Also – hiring juniors is cost-effective. Duh.

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 15%

Gaming

20% fewer Senior hires

Mass recruitment is being reduced and reoriented toward less qualified specialists. Seniors are too expensive.

• Senior hiring remains highly targeted, focused on specific project needs or gap filling.
• Upskilling addresses most remaining competency gaps.

30% more Lead hires

Leadership-level turnover is the primary driver, with specialists being poached through improved compensation and conditions.

• Nurturing lead talent inside the organization is mostly unfeasible due to workflow organization even with the talent development pipeline intact.

20% more Middle hires

Middle talent hiring growth is linked to increasing project complexity and the need for specialists performing manual, execution-heavy tasks.

• Assigning seniors to such work is cost-inefficient, while middle specialists can be grown into domain-specific seniors over time.

Additional growth is driven by staff turnover resulting from exploitative working conditions.

30% more Junior hires

Similar to middle-level hiring, growth is economically motivated. Hiring junior is cost-effective.

The salary gap between a Lead and a Junior can reach 10–11x (on average 5–6x).

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 20%

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is at the intersection of all tech niches. Because of that, security-related roles exist across virtually all segments, making this a cumulative outline with no clear distinction between the niches.

40% more Senior hires

The skill gap is a major driving for companies to go out of their way to hire a high-profile specialist.

At the same time, the companies that directly operation in cybersecurity consulting and cybersecurity enterprise solution development actual hiring volume growth for senior is closer to 10%.

10% more Lead hires

Lead talent hiring is fully case-by-case. In most cases, companies prefer to invest in existing staff and nurture domain-specific leads internally.

• This approach depends heavily on organizational infrastructure, which is not always feasible under current economic conditions.

Otherwise, get ready to upset your company’s salary structure.

20% fewer Middle hires, 10% fewer Junior hires

The Junior-middle decrease has more to do with the fact that most specialists switch to cybersecurity around the time they reach upper middle and senior levels.

• There are not that many pure cybersecurity specialists that start in that domain.
• In addition, companies can’t really fully invest into this kind of talent development pipeline.
• There are high skill barriers, limited mentoring capacity, and difficulties in structuring teams to support safe professional growth without burnout or overload.

As a result, it is easier to buy a talent than to develop one.

eCommerce

15% fewer Senior hires

The majority of recruitment has shifted to a targeted case-by-case mode, with a strong focus on retaining highly qualified specialists.

10% fewer Lead hires

Upskilling, internal recruitment, and retention are currently more effective strategies.

Given that eCommerce projects operate differently from other product types.

• Their primary goal is to remain operationally stable rather than pursue continuous innovation or paradigm shifts.
• As a result, it is easier to nurture Leads internally, except when filling critical gaps.

20% more Middle hires, 30% more Junior hires

Junior-middle hiring volume growth is driven by staff turnover and organizational specifics: companies hire in volume and gradually filter talent upward.

• It’s more cost-effective and less risky than hiring expensive senior-lead talent and then play whack-a-mole retention games.

Additionally, there is a large amount of manual platform maintenance work that does not require highly qualified specialists but does require continuous operational support.

• Overall hiring volume reduction: 25%

What does this whole thing even mean?

As you can see, the hiring volume analysis tells a bit different story. This is not a hiring crisis per se. The better way to put it is a reconfiguration of hiring logic due to volatile market environment and sustainable business planning. But that’s a mouthful, right?

So the main takeaways are:

• fewer expensive external Senior and Lead hires;
• greater reliance on internal growth;
• Middle specialists as the structural backbone;
• Junior hiring only where infrastructure allows it.

Also – the business is down because market overcrowding and the cost of living crisis ravages the whole thing with a fishing knife like it owes it money.