The roles nobody applies to: what Indeed's shortage data says, and what our own board shows
Indeed Hiring Lab measured which Italian job ads get the fewest applications. Engineering, technology and healthcare lead. We ran the same question against our own board and published what we found — including where we have almost nothing.
Italy does not have a shortage of job ads. It has a shortage of people applying to particular ones.
Indeed Hiring Lab measured this, and Sky TG24 published the ranking on 24 August 2026. The measure is daily applications received, compared with the average across all postings:
Role — applications vs. average
- Reliability engineer: −95%
- Industrial and electronic engineers: −76%
- Software developers: −72%
- Pharmacists: −71%
- Mechanical engineers: −70%
- Information design and research: −68%
- Healthcare technicians: −67%
- Civil engineers: −60%
- Mathematics and statistics: −58%
- Beauty and wellness, medical specialists: −57%
Three sectors carry most of the list: engineering, technology, healthcare. Indeed's own reading of the causes is unremarkable and probably right — technology moving faster than curricula, an ageing population, and a gap between what employers describe and what the available workforce can demonstrate.
One geographic detail is worth pulling out because it decides who this is about: half of all Italian postings in mathematics and statistics are in Lombardy.
What "hard to fill" actually means for a student
A −72% figure for software developers does not mean those jobs are easy to get. It means the pool applying to each posting is thin. Those are different things, and only the second one is in the data.
What it does change is leverage. If a role receives a fifth of the applications an average role receives, the cost of being legible to that employer goes down. A candidate who can show what they have built — not describe it, show it — is competing against far fewer people than the headline "youth unemployment" conversation implies.
That is a narrow claim and we are going to keep it narrow. Indeed's dataset says nothing about graduates, nothing about ITS Academy diplomates, and nothing about young people specifically. Anyone telling you this report proves a point about vocational training is extending it past what it measured.
What our own board looks like against that list
We can check one thing directly: whether the roles Indeed says nobody applies to are roles we actually carry.
On 25 August 2026 our board held 10,371 active public postings. By field:
Field — open roles
- Business: 4,200
- Engineering: 2,579
- Technology: 1,842
- Law: 445
- Healthcare: 356
- Media: 325
- Design: 245
- Architecture: 235
- Trades: 125
- Science: 121
- Education: 72
- Writing: 35
- Social sciences: 13
- Arts: 11
Engineering, technology and healthcare together come to 4,777 roles — 46% of everything open. The three fields Indeed names as hardest to fill are the three we are deepest in. That is not a coincidence and it is not a strategy either: it is what happens when a board is assembled from employers who are hiring, because those are the employers who have the most trouble.
Where we have almost nothing, and we are going to say so
Social sciences: 13 roles. Arts: 11. Writing: 35.
If you are studying philosophy, art history, literature or social work, our board is close to useless to you today, and the polite version of that sentence would waste your time. The shortage list above is engineering-shaped, our board is engineering-shaped, and the humanities are barely present in either.
We have written about why that gap is structural rather than a matter of effort: the employers who publish through the applicant-tracking systems we read are corporate, and research institutes, cultural foundations and public bodies mostly do not.
What actually follows from this
For a student in one of the listed fields: the constraint on you is not the number of openings. It is whether an employer can tell, quickly, what you can do. That is a solvable problem and it is the one we work on.
For a career service: the list is a targeting document. It says where your graduates face the least competition per application — and if your institution runs engineering, mechatronics, health technology or mathematics programmes, that is a concrete thing to tell students in September rather than in June.
For everyone: check the numbers. Indeed's are in the article. Ours are on our facts page, each with the query it came from and the date we last ran it. We would rather publish a small number that is true than a large one you cannot check.