Companies that rely on official industry average salaries when recruiting are finding themselves forced to increase offered wages by as much as 100% to attract new employees, Ilona Platonova, Analytics Manager at LavoroSolutions, told Kursiv.
“The competition index on hh.kz – the ratio of active resumes to job vacancies – stood at 15.7 in the first quarter of 2026. That’s fifteen applicants per job opening. At first glance, this is an absolute ’employer’s market’,” she noted. “But for accurate HR planning, it’s essential to understand the specifics of the digital labour market: the architecture of online platforms and the accessibility of generative AI assistants encourage candidates to generate and send out dozens of tailored CVs, mathematically inflating competition.”
The Illusion of a Large Candidate Pool
According to Platonova, the trend of increasing CV volumes is stable, with year-on-year growth persisting throughout 2025–2026. Analysts at LavoroSolutions believe the root cause of the surge in candidate activity in Q1 2026 is inflationary pressure. Employees are proactively monitoring the market for better financial and working conditions without leaving their current jobs.
The main problem is that the illusion of a talent surplus is distributed extremely unevenly across the market. Hyper-concentration of job seekers is observed in office and administrative positions, particularly on online recruiting platforms.
A completely different picture emerges in the real economy sector, which is currently the main driver of GDP. On hh.kz, “Manufacturing and Service Maintenance” has become one of the few areas with vacancy growth.
While generating demand for personnel, industrial enterprises are paradoxically losing human capital, Platonova noted. The replacement rate there has fallen to 83%: for every 100 specialists who leave, factories can hire only 83 new ones. (By comparison, in retail and finance, this figure is close to 95–99%.)
Data from LavoroSolutions shows that manufacturing vacancies are transitioning into the “hard-to-fill” category. Due to a shortage of relevant candidates, the average time-to-hire across the market exceeds 90 days.
“The bottom line: CVs exist. Candidates do not. A queue of applicants may form in ‘office’ sectors, while the real economy remains in deficit amid growing production volumes,” Platonova believes.
How Salaries Double
In the process of recruiting a specific skilled professional, businesses may encounter the “final offer effect,” she explained. Against a backdrop of double-digit inflation, candidates’ salary expectations rise sharply during interviews. For candidates, this is a defensive reaction to prevent their families’ real well-being from declining. This is especially evident during headhunting: to poach a candidate, a business must not only close this “inflationary gap” but also pay a premium for the risk of leaving a stable employer.
“In the first quarter of 2026, professional recruitment at LavoroSolutions recorded gaps between the initial offered pay range and the final offer,” Platonova reported. “Vacancies for service engineers came in with a salary range of 500,000–800,000 tenge but were closed at 1 million tenge – 25% above the upper limit. For financial positions, vacancies were opened with an average range of around 633,000 tenge. However, depending on qualifications or position level, final offers reached 1.28 million tenge.”
Thus, the difference between expectations and the actual market cost of talent can exceed 100%. Even for sales positions, where the hh.kz competition index shows a high level of competition among applicants, actual offers exceed initial ranges by up to 10%.
Consequently, the recruitment firm believes that rigidly linking salary ranges to the annual inflation rate is ineffective under current conditions. HR directors need to move toward dynamic — quarterly or semi-annual — reassessment of hiring and retention budgets, as replacing a key engineer or financial specialist can cost +30% of the current payroll.
Furthermore, in situations of talent shortage, it is critically important for businesses to develop internal mobility and training programmes. For seasonal and temporary projects, using staffing or recruitment process outsourcing may be advisable to transfer turnover risks and administrative burdens to the provider.
The company noted that the average nominal monthly wage at the end of the first quarter of 2026 reached 461,486 tenge. Despite nominal wage growth, double-digit inflation pushed the real income index negative. Open data from the recruiting platform hh.kz shows an “employer’s market” in the first quarter: the number of vacancies decreased by 12.8%, while the number of active CVs increased by 17%. The median offered salary decreased slightly to 300,801 tenge.
Source: Kursiv
