The 2022–2024 layoff cycle is largely over. The companies that over-hired during the pandemic have restructured. The ones that survived are leaner, more selective, and actually growing again — but differently than before.
If you are job hunting in European tech right now, the landscape looks quite different from the one most career advice was written for. Here is what is actually happening.
Hiring is up, but headcount targets are conservative. Companies that previously hired fast and managed people out are now hiring slow and trying to retain. That means fewer open roles at any given time — but roles that stay open longer because companies are being more deliberate about who they hire.
The practical implication: you will see fewer job postings than in 2021, but the ones you see are real. Companies are not posting jobs to build a pipeline. They are posting because they have a gap they need to fill.
Where the hiring is concentrated:
Lisbon has established itself as one of Europe's most active startup hubs. The city has a high concentration of remote-friendly companies and a growing number of European HQs for US startups that want a European base. The cost of living relative to London or Amsterdam makes it attractive to both employers and employees.
Amsterdam remains one of the strongest tech markets in Europe. Booking.com, Adyen, TomTom, and dozens of scale-ups are headquartered here. The market skews toward product engineering and data, and compensation is competitive.
After a difficult period, Berlin's startup ecosystem is recovering. The city still has one of the highest concentrations of early-stage companies in Europe, and the market for engineers, designers, and product managers has stabilised.
London remains the largest and most liquid tech job market in Europe. Financial services, fintech, and enterprise software are the dominant sectors. Compensation is the highest in Europe, but so is competition.
A significant portion of European tech roles are now fully remote or remote-first. Many of the most interesting companies — particularly in the developer tools, AI, and infrastructure spaces — hire entirely without geographic constraint.
LinkedIn is where most people look, which means it is where most of the competition is. The highest signal-to-noise ratio tends to be elsewhere.
The mechanics of getting hired have shifted. Three things are working reliably right now:
Sending fifty generic applications produces fewer interviews than sending ten tailored ones. Hiring managers can tell immediately whether someone read the job description or just blasted their CV everywhere. The ones who read it — and whose application reflects that — stand out sharply.
For technical roles especially, showing rather than telling has become more important. Engineers with public GitHub work, designers with a clean portfolio, PMs with documented case studies get meaningfully more callbacks than those without.
Getting your application flagged by someone internal — even a warm introduction on LinkedIn — still dramatically improves your conversion rate. The effect is largest at smaller companies where a single person often controls the hiring process.
The advice that worked in 2020–2022 — apply everywhere, get in fast, move quickly — does not work as well in the current market. What works now:
hirepath aggregates roles from Greenhouse, Lever, and more — filtered for engineering, design, product, and data roles. Adapt your CV to any role for free.
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