The candidate has a counter-offer. He announces it without aggression, with the calm of someone doing you a favour by warning you: the market is tight, profiles like his are scarce, and he has other conversations under way.
You have no way of verifying the second part of that sentence. The first, you do.
What ten years of European statistics establish
Between 2015 and 2025, the number of technology specialists in the Union grew by 59,4 %. They now exceed ten million people, or 5,0 % of total European employment. France accounts for 1,4 million, 13,7 % of the Union total.
A population that grows by nearly 60 % in ten years is not a population becoming scarce. Over that period, no other major European employment aggregate has moved by this much.
These figures are published by Eurostat under a licence permitting commercial reuse with attribution. You can send them as an attachment, which is not true of any recruitment agency’s pay scale.
What these figures do not disprove
The aggregate says nothing about your position. Ten million people spread across heterogeneous skills, experience levels and geographic areas can coexist with a real tension on one specific skill, in one specific city, at one specific level.
Growth in supply does not cancel out local tension. It shifts the burden of proof. When a candidate, or a contractor, invokes a general shortage, he is making a claim that public statistics contradict. What remains for him is to demonstrate the scarcity of his particular case, which is a different conversation, shorter and more factual.
How to use this in an interview, without brandishing it
You do not cite Eurostat to a candidate. That would cost you the interview and the candidate.
You use it to decide internally. If your pay scale is consistent with the median for the role and the candidate asks for 20 % above it on the grounds of a general shortage, you know the grounds do not hold, and you decide based on the only question that remains: is this particular person worth that gap to you.
That question has an answer. The general shortage does not.
What remains true on the exit side
A European figure does not replace your situation. A company where a single employee holds up a critical system does not have a labour market problem, it has an internal concentration problem. The market can be abundant and your replacement can still take a long time, because what you are looking for is not a profile, it is a person who knows your system.
The sentence to remember
The scarcity of a market and the scarcity of a person are two different subjects. Only one of the two can be used against you.
Sources
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ICT specialists in employment · Eurostat, 1 January 2026
Licence: CC BY 4.0 · Croissance de 59,4 % du nombre de spécialistes des technologies dans l'Union entre 2015 et 2025, plus de 10 millions de personnes soit 5,0 % de l'emploi total, 1,4 million en France soit 13,7 % du total de l'Union. Réutilisation commerciale autorisée avec attribution. Actualisation annuelle, date de publication de l'édition citée à confirmer.