Despite frequent discussion about the shortage of qualified workers, businesses appear to have little need for large numbers of experienced professionals. This applies to retail, logistics, construction and even, to some extent, the IT sector, which only recently complained about an influx of inexperienced newcomers and a shortage of seasoned specialists. The reason is simple: professional experience comes at a price. As a result, employers are increasingly trying to hire less experienced workers on lower salaries and train them if necessary. The consequences could be serious: instead of higher efficiency, businesses risk declining standards, more defects, lower-quality goods and services, and burnout among experienced mentors
Until now, the main cause of recruitment problems has been the mismatch between labour supply and demand in the Russian labour market. In 2026, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.
Where employers previously struggled to find experienced professionals, most job seekers now appear to be too experienced for what companies are looking for.
That is the conclusion that can be drawn from a new report by the recruitment portal SuperJob covering the first half of the year.
The imbalance is most pronounced in retail. According to the portal, 63% of vacancies are aimed at candidates with no experience or up to one year of experience. Less than 1% of vacancies are intended for applicants with more than six years of experience.
A similar pattern can be seen in construction. Some 45% of vacancies are intended for workers with one to three years of experience, while a further 37% target candidates with three to six years of experience. Only 6% of vacancies are suitable for genuinely experienced professionals. Meanwhile, workers with more than six years of experience accounted for 68% of all CVs submitted in the construction sector.
In logistics, 49% of vacancies were open to candidates with no experience or only minimal experience, while another 41% targeted applicants with one to three years of experience. Just 1% of vacancies were intended for established professionals. At the same time, workers with more than six years of experience accounted for 55% of all CVs posted in the sector.
Notably, the same contradiction has now emerged even in the IT industry. Until recently, the sector was struggling with an influx of newcomers who had completed basic three-month programming courses after being attracted by reports of record salaries for IT specialists. At the same time, given the challenges of digitalisation, the adoption of artificial intelligence and the forced import substitution of software, the industry needed specialists with extensive knowledge capable of solving complex problems.
According to the portal, only 8% of IT vacancies are now aimed at professionals with more than six years of experience. Most openings are for candidates with one to three years of experience (41%) or three to six years (38%). Yet the largest share of CVs in the IT sector (56%) came from applicants with more than six years of experience.
The authors of the report noted that these experienced applicants naturally ‘expect higher salaries’.
The industrial sector, however, continues to display the imbalance that economists most often discuss: a shortage of relatively experienced workers combined with an oversupply of newcomers.
In industry, most vacancies are intended for workers with one to three years of experience (58%) or three to six years (31%). Among job seekers, however, the largest group consists of candidates with no professional experience or only minimal experience, accounting for 46% of all CVs.
At first glance, the figures appear self-explanatory. However, at least two important qualifications should be made. First, the predominance of CVs from experienced workers may reflect the strategy of already employed professionals who are quietly testing the labour market. These are qualified employees who are evidently dissatisfied with something in their current jobs and are gradually exploring more attractive opportunities, but they are not necessarily prepared to resign immediately even if they receive an offer. Much of the apparent imbalance may be explained by this behaviour.
Second, it should be remembered that even a very large job portal cannot fully reflect trends across the country’s entire labour market. Nevertheless, such platforms provide a substantial body of data on companies and workers that choose to advertise there.
Labour market analysts interviewed by Nezavisimaya Gazeta cautiously confirmed some of the report’s conclusions while stressing that much depends on sector-specific conditions and the particular period being analysed. The situation remains uneven and can change quickly.
According to Nadezhda Neyelova, Head of IT Recruitment at Ancor, the tendency for employers to seek less experienced workers on lower salaries instead of seasoned professionals is becoming apparent in the IT sector, although it is far from universal.
‘Some companies deliberately want to hire less experienced specialists because they have limited budgets and need to stay within a particular salary range. They intend to develop these employees internally,’ Neyelova explained.
But there is also the opposite extreme: employers that lack sufficient budgets yet still hope to recruit the very best candidates. According to Neyelova, these are often industrial companies seeking to introduce complex digital systems into their production processes without fully appreciating either the scale of the task or the level of expertise required.
Boris Voronkov, Head of Ancor’s Industry and Agribusiness Practice, confirmed that some employers are willing to hire relatively inexperienced specialists for positions such as design engineers or sales managers. However, he described this as a forced measure. More broadly, employers are trying to strike a balance: rather than chasing ‘stars’, they prefer solid mid-level professionals with moderate salary expectations who may lack outstanding achievements but have already built up sufficient industry experience.
Yevgenia Sosina, Head of Ancor’s Pharmaceutical Practice, said that in the pharmaceutical industry and related sectors companies may, in some cases, hire candidates with limited or no experience in the expectation of reducing costs and providing job-specific training later. Even so, she stressed that this is not yet a widespread practice.
Experts warned that if the imbalances identified in the study continue to deepen, they could become a serious problem for the Russian economy. The consequences may not be immediate, but they will eventually become apparent, according to Olga Lebedinskaya, Associate Professor at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.
The first negative consequence, she said, is a lower return on investment in human capital. Employers may not have time to benefit from training workers before those employees leave for competitors offering higher salaries. The second consequence is burnout among experienced employees who serve as mentors and train newcomers only to see them move elsewhere.
The third consequence is that inexperienced workers inevitably make more mistakes.
‘In the short and medium term, this can lead to lower product quality, more defective output and poorer customer service, directly damaging a company’s reputation,’ Lebedinskaya said.
Moreover, such companies tend to become less capable over time. ‘If staff turnover is constant and there are no experienced mentors, institutional knowledge is lost. No one remembers why an important decision was made five years ago,’ Lebedinskaya explained. ‘The company loses its ability to create sophisticated, high-quality products and falls behind competitors that know how to retain experienced professionals.’
ORIGINAL: NG/Experienced Professionals Are Becoming Too Expensive for Many Employers
