The IT job market in Poland has begun to resemble the opposite of the boom seen just a few years ago. The average number of candidates per job offer has risen to several dozen, while salaries have stagnated or even slightly declined. Experts say it openly: “The market has become an employer’s market, and specialists who were in high demand not long ago are now struggling to find work.”
In such conditions, companies are eager to raise expectations in job ads—even though in reality they intend to hire someone at the same rates as before. So what exactly are “artificially inflated requirements”, and how do they affect candidates?
What are artificially inflated requirements?
“Inflated requirements” are essentially an employer’s wish list, often bearing little resemblance to the day-to-day responsibilities of the role being offered. Industry portals point out that many job postings look more like unrealistic wish lists than honest descriptions of minimum qualifications.
According to an analysis by Teal, nearly half of positions labeled as entry-level actually require mid-level experience. HR professionals consistently note that companies have become accustomed to hunting for unicorns—candidates who can do the work of three people, combining, for example, backend development, frontend work, and data analysis.
Szymon Stempkowski, a recruiter and trainer, puts it bluntly: “Sometimes company or manager requirements are just a wishlist—we want to find a unicorn. The problem is, such people don’t exist, or if they do, their expertise is high in one area and lower in others.”
In practice, this means job ads often list more responsibilities than one person can realistically handle.
How are inflated requirements formulated?
In practice, this happens in several characteristic ways. Common examples include:
“Aspirational” requirements aimed at overqualification: A junior position requiring several years of experience. Teal’s report shows that nearly half of “entry-level” jobs demand experience typical of mid- or senior-level roles. The psychological effect is clear: a young candidate, even a strong one, feels that something is still missing.
The “100% universal” list: Employers combine tasks from multiple departments into a single role—system administration, backend and frontend development, and data analysis. One study found that every ninth job ad includes the phrase “wear many hats,” explicitly asking candidates to perform multiple roles at once.
Absurd combinations: For example, a company might require “6 years of experience in a technology that has existed for only 4 years.” This is a classic case of an excessive skills list that quickly discourages good specialists. As one HR blog warns, an overly long and unrealistic list of skills in a job posting “leads to the loss of valuable candidates.”
Lack of priorities: Many “must-haves,” with no distinction between critical and optional skills. Experts advise that job ads should focus on the most essential requirements and leave the rest for the interview stage. In practice, however, companies often copy templates and dump everything that might possibly be useful into the ad, artificially raising the bar.
These examples show that employers—intentionally or out of habit—add “excess” to their requirements, knowing that only a small fraction of candidates will meet every single point.
Consequences for candidates Salary negotiations
An overload of requirements weakens the candidate’s negotiating position. When dozens of CVs apply for a single role, the employer feels free to choose someone who only partially meets the criteria—and has little incentive to pay more.
This is reflected in salaries: despite high applicant numbers, “wages remain flat or fall, while requirements keep rising.” Seeing similarly demanding job ads, candidates sometimes lower their own salary expectations, assuming it’s not worth standing out too much. As a result, the market tilts further toward employers: they dictate the terms, and candidates are more willing to accept lower pay ranges.
Self-esteem and confidence
Excessive and inconsistent requirements can also seriously damage morale. Teal’s report warns that when job descriptions are too broad or misaligned, “even highly qualified candidates start to question their value.”
A candidate who meets 70–80% of the listed requirements often still feels inadequate, leading to the well-known impostor syndrome. As wealthwaggle.com sums it up: “Gardens are full of people who think they don’t meet all the requirements—it’s not their fault, but the way job ads are written.”
Experts emphasize that such “dream requirements” quietly eliminate many excellent candidates from the process. In other words, a strong application often ends up discarded simply because someone overdid the expectations list.
Importantly, the consequences don’t stop at hiring. If a company recruits a senior specialist hoping for innovative projects, but it turns out the job is “just building landing pages,” the employee will quickly feel exploited and leave. Data shows that as many as one-third of new hires quit within 90 days when the actual job differs from what was promised in the offer. High turnover is costly for companies—but for candidates, it means ongoing uncertainty and repeated job searches.
Impact on the IT job market as a whole
At scale, these practices lower wages and reduce recruitment quality across the entire industry. What was a candidate-driven market just a few years ago has shifted decisively in favor of employers.
In practice, this means growing pressure to keep salaries low despite increasing requirements—something confirmed by independent analyses. For example, HRK reports that 42% of companies admit their available salary budgets are lower than candidates’ expectations. This indicates that employers are limiting investment in new roles, often due to internal hiring priorities or hiring freezes.
The result is that many people remain sidelined. An excess of job ads combined with a trust crisis fuels the phenomenon of ghost jobs—postings published without any real intention to hire. Global studies show that up to 4 in 10 companies have admitted to posting fictitious job offers. While this is a separate issue, it fits into the same mechanism: it increases market chaos.
Candidates scrolling through hundreds of ads with “unrealistically high bars” lose any sense of what is actually achievable. Frustration grows, and many specialists come to believe that job postings consist mainly of “unrealistic, wishful requirements,” while salary negotiations feel like fighting windmills.
Conclusion
When employers publish excessively high requirements in job ads, they gain a powerful tool for devaluing every candidate. They set rigid criteria that exceed the real needs of the role and then exploit the surplus of applicants—maintaining low salary offers and ignoring candidates unwilling to “absorb those costs.”
From a candidate’s perspective, this is an unfavorable situation. That’s why it’s crucial to ask detailed questions about actual responsibilities and the real project profile, rather than blindly trusting buzzwords from the job ad. If an offer is clearly misaligned with reality, it’s worth being prepared to negotiate—or calmly move on and look for an employer who is more likely to appreciate your skills than to overestimate (or misuse) them.