“Senior or No One”. How Companies Are Cutting Off the Branch the IT Market Is Sitting On

In many companies, IT recruitment today starts with the same sentence: “We need a senior.” Ideally available immediately, with experience in a similar project, independent, communicative, and ready to join the team without a long onboarding process.

From the perspective of a CIO, CTO, or project manager, this is understandable. The roadmap will not wait, the backlog keeps growing, and the business expects results. The problem begins when everyone is looking only for ready-made experts, while fewer and fewer companies create space for people who could become those experts.

The data clearly shows the scale of the phenomenon. According to No Fluff Jobs, in 2025 around 60% of IT job offers were aimed at seniors (NoFluffJobs), and in Q1 2026 nearly 60% of job ads still concerned senior positions. Slightly more than one-third of offers were aimed at mid-level specialists, and only around 5% at juniors. 

Data from Just Join IT, in turn, indicates that juniors accounted for only 4.79% of job offers, while mid-level specialists and seniors together represented more than 95% of all ads. (JustJoinIT)

This is not only a problem for candidates at the beginning of their careers. It is a problem for employers who, in 2–3 years, will be looking for mid-level specialists, while the market may have no one to offer them.

Why does the “senior or no one” model harm companies?

A senior seems like the safest choice. They are expected to join the project faster, make technical decisions, not require hand-holding, and relieve the current team. In theory, everything makes sense.

In practice, companies are increasingly competing for the same limited group of candidates. The result? Longer processes, higher rates, greater pressure on budgets, and less willingness to compromise. Fast recruitment of specialists is becoming more difficult precisely because the market is not renewing competencies quickly enough.

A junior does not become a mid-level specialist after completing a course or watching a few tutorials. They need real tasks, code review, contact with production, conversations with more experienced people, and space to make controlled mistakes.

If companies do not give them this opportunity, they will soon be paying more for competencies they did not help build.

An IT recruitment agency sees this problem more broadly

An individual company sees its own process: how many candidates applied, who failed the technical stage, and why the manager did not accept a profile. An IT recruitment agency sees recurring market patterns: inflated requirements, inadequate budgets, overly broad job descriptions, and roles that in practice combine three positions into one.

That is why a good talent acquisition partner should not only send CVs. They should help answer several uncomfortable but necessary questions:

• do we really need a senior, or would a strong mid-level specialist be enough?
• which competencies are critical from day one?
• what can be developed within the project?
• does the current team have room for mentoring?
• does the budget match the market?

Sometimes the best decision is not to continue hunting for the “perfect senior,” but to redesign the role. This may mean bringing in a contract senior for architectural tasks, a mid-level specialist for the permanent team, and a junior or regular specialist for tasks that enable growth without putting the project at risk.

Junior programs: yes, but not at scale and not at random

Returning to juniors does not mean returning to mass bootcamps or hiring people without preparation. That would be irresponsible toward both the team and the candidates themselves.

The solution lies in controlled junior programs: small cohorts, strong mentoring, real production tasks, and clear development criteria. It is better to hire 3 people and guide them well than to take on 20 candidates for whom no one has time.

In such programs, it is not worth measuring only the number of closed tickets. What matters much more is whether the junior:

• understands the consequences of their technical decisions,
• uses feedback,
• can ask good questions,
• recognizes risks,
• makes fewer of the same mistakes after subsequent iterations.

This is exactly the kind of experience that builds future mid-level specialists, and later seniors.

The problem is already being noticed - this is a good signal for the market

At DCG, we are not merely observing this problem from the sidelines. As an agency, we were happy to take part in the No Fluff Jobs #WiosnaJuniorów campaign, whose goal was to encourage employers to open their doors to interns and juniors by enabling them to publish free job ads for juniors, interns, or trainees. By mobilizing our partners and reviewing the offers we had at the time, we added all possible job ads to the portal, placing ourselves among one of the 12 most engaged companies participating in this initiative.

According to information published by No Fluff Jobs, during the 3 months of the campaign, the number of available junior offers increased by more than 14% compared with the 3 months before its launch.

This still does not solve the structural problem of the market, but it shows that change is possible when employers begin to act together.

For us, this is an important direction. Recruitment for an IT project cannot rely solely on quickly “patching holes” with seniors. Sometimes an expert is indeed needed immediately. In such cases, IT expert outsourcing or a B2B contract with an experienced specialist works well.

At the same time, companies should also think about who will take over more responsible roles in a few years.

The most common objections from employers

“We do not have time to train juniors”

This is often true. Not every team has the capacity for mentoring today. But the solution does not have to be giving up on juniors entirely. You can start with one person, clearly assigned to a mentor and specific tasks.

“The junior will leave once we train them”

They might. A senior may also leave after three months. The risk of turnover always exists. The difference is that companies that do not invest in people’s development at all later buy those competencies on the market at a higher price.

“We need results immediately”

In that case, it is worth separating the needs. For an urgent project, you can hire a senior or use IT expert outsourcing. At the same time, you can build a small, controlled junior program that will not put out the current fire, but will reduce the risk of future ones.

To sum up

The “senior or no one” strategy is understandable in the short term, but risky in the longer perspective. If most companies want ready-made experts, while few organizations give juniors a chance, the market begins to limit its own inflow of talent.

This is not about lowering standards. It is about designing teams more intelligently: seniors where they are truly needed; mid-level specialists where they can take responsibility; juniors where they have the right conditions to learn through real tasks.

A good IT recruitment agency can help a company look at recruitment more broadly than through a single open position. Because fast recruitment of specialists only makes sense when it does not come at the expense of the future of the entire market.