Recruitment difficulty · Monza e della Brianza, Italy
Two in three factory workers cannot be found
The figure
In 2025, companies in Monza e Brianza reported that 67.5% of the factory workers they were looking for were hard to recruit. In 2024 the same share stood at 66.8%: the difficulty is not easing, it is growing. The survey comes from the Assolombarda Research Centre, processing data from the Excelsior Information System.
Technicians follow closely, at 62.1%.
The comparison with the rest of Italy shows the scale of the problem.
| Profile and area | Hard to recruit | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Factory workers, Monza e Brianza | 67.5% | 2025 |
| Factory workers, Monza e Brianza | 66.8% | 2024 |
| Technicians, Monza e Brianza | 62.1% | 2025 |
| All profiles, Italy | 42% | July 2026 |
Why people cannot be found
The Excelsior Information System also asks companies the reason behind the difficulty, and the answer is more interesting than the total.
In the July 2026 press release, out of 42% of positions hard to fill in Italy, 26.3% is due to a lack of candidates and 12.3% to inadequate preparation.
The ratio is a little over two to one. Put plainly: for every company that finds unprepared candidates, two companies find no candidates at all.
What this means for a company in Brianza
The distinction between "they do not apply" and "they apply unprepared" is not a statistical detail. These are two different problems, and they are solved by two different trades.
If the problem were preparation, the answer would be training: in-house courses, agreements with technical schools, on-the-job coaching. The market of training providers is large and well equipped, and on that front companies already know where to turn.
But the July 2026 figure says the main cause is a different one: people do not arrive. And when people do not arrive, the problem is not what they can do. The problem is that the company never entered their list of options.
A firm in Lissone looking for a welder does not only compete with other firms in Lissone. It competes with the logistics hubs of Agrate Brianza, with construction sites in Milan, with anyone offering better shifts twenty minutes away by car. In a market where 67.5% of factory positions are hard to fill, the candidate is the one doing the choosing.
This reverses the sequence many companies are used to. The interview stops being the moment when the company assesses the person and becomes the moment when the person assesses the company. Whoever walks into that room has already decided to consider themselves: the real match was played earlier, when they read the advert or heard about the company from someone who works there.
What to do on Monday
1. Count the flow, not the quality. Take the last job advert published and look at two numbers: how many days it has been online, and how many applications arrived. If applications are close to zero, the problem sits upstream of the interview, and no stricter selection will fix it.
2. Reread the advert on a phone. Open it the way a candidate opens it: standing up, in three minutes, between other things. Count how many lines say what you require and how many say what you offer. If the balance tips entirely towards the first, that advert is filtering out people you would gladly have hired.
3. Ask the people who joined in the last twelve months why they chose you. Three questions, ten minutes each: what they did before, what convinced them to apply, what they found different from what they expected. Those answers are the raw material for rewriting an advert, and nobody can give them to you instead of the people who work there.
None of the three actions requires a budget. All three produce information the company does not have today.
September is when this weighs most
The Excelsior Information System forecasts around 1.5 million contracts in the July-September quarter of 2026, slightly down on the same quarter of 2025.
September is when Italian companies reopen their hiring plans after the summer break. Open positions do not rise gradually: they switch on almost all at once. A company posting an advert in September competes against far more simultaneous adverts than in July, drawing on the same pool of people in the same area.
For a company in Brianza this means the three actions above are worth more in this month than at any other point in the year.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is hiring harder in Brianza than elsewhere in Italy?
- Brianza holds a very high concentration of manufacturing companies, with many firms looking for the same factory and technical profiles at the same time, within a radius of a few kilometres. Demand concentrates, the supply of people does not. The result is far sharper local competition than the national average.
- Is raising pay enough to solve the problem?
- Pay matters and remains the first lever, but on its own it acts on people who already know the company and are weighing an offer. It does not act on people who never apply because the company never entered their list of options. That second problem is solved before the interview, not during it.
- What changes in September for companies that need to hire?
- September is when Italian companies reopen their hiring plans after the summer break, so open positions rise all at once. A company posting a job in September competes against many more simultaneous adverts than in July, drawing on the same pool of local candidates.
Method and limits
The figures on Brianza come from the Assolombarda Research Centre, processing data from the Excelsior Information System, and refer to the year 2025. The national figure comes from the Excelsior press release of July 2026. These numbers measure hiring forecasts declared by companies, not hires actually completed, and cover only the companies that answered the survey. The data does not say how many positions were eventually left unfilled, nor for how long.
Sources
- Assolombarda Research Centre — Labour and skills demand in Monza Brianza Data year 2025 · source accessed on 27 August 2026
- Excelsior Information System — Unioncamere, monthly press release Data July 2026 · source accessed on 27 August 2026
Flash Forward is the Flash Communication observatory on people inside the small and medium enterprises of Monza e della Brianza, Italy. The figures in this piece are re-checked at the source every six months.
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