DEV Community: Yuksel Pamuk

Agency hiring in Europe: the company you will work for rarely writes the job ad

Yuksel Pamuk — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:19:04 +0000

In live job ads pulled on 5 November 2026, agencies or recruiters had posted 144 of 150 German warehouse and factory ads, at least 8 in 10 in the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and the UK, and 37 of 44 German accountant ads.

Between the company car and the 30 days of holiday, a cleaning firm hiring in Trier lists one more perk, in capital letters: "KEINE Zeitarbeit". No agency work. You would be hired directly.

It is an odd thing to boast about, until you look at who writes the other ads. If you answer a warehouse or factory job ad online in Europe this month, as distribution centres staff up for Christmas, it was very likely not written by the company whose boxes you will move. A staffing agency or a recruiter wrote it, and often the agency, not the factory, will be your employer.

I had an AI agent read about 1,500 live job ads on teppek in seven European countries, from German forklift jobs to Dutch finance clerks, and sort them by two questions: who posted this ad, and who will actually employ the person hired? The answer was more lopsided than I expected, and it is not only a blue-collar story.

Finding 1: in warehouse ads, the middleman does the talking

On 5 November 2026, agencies or recruiters had posted 144 of 150 German warehouse and factory ads on teppek, 48 of 50 in the Netherlands, 37 of 45 in Poland and 30 of 37 in the UK.

Pickers, forklift drivers, machine operators: in Germany at most six of the 150 ads came from the company where the work is done. Nearly half open with some version of "für unseren Kunden", for our client, who usually stays unnamed until you apply.

This is not one agency flooding the board. The German ads came from 55 different advertisers. Italy needed a closer look, because one agency network posted almost half of its ads; set it aside and 27 of the remaining 28 still came from agencies. In France a single network dominated even more, so France stays out of the count.

The pay looks standardised too. Among German agency ads that state an hourly rate, the most common figure is €15.33, and it appears in ads from 17 different agencies. That is about €1.40 above the €13.90 legal minimum. When 17 competitors quote the same cent, you are looking at a shared pay scale rather than a market price. One likely reason, which the ads alone cannot prove: German temp agencies largely pay by a sector-wide collective agreement, and more than two dozen of the agency ads I read mention that "Tarif".

Finding 2: office jobs go through middlemen too, but your boss changes

37 of 44 German accounting and bookkeeping ads and 43 of 50 Dutch finance and admin ads on teppek were posted by agencies or recruiters.

I expected the middlemen to thin out at the desk. They barely did. What changes is the job the middleman does.

In the German accountant ads, 9 of 44 say in their opening lines that this is "Direktvermittlung": the recruiter finds you, the client hires you, and the agency steps out. Among the 150 warehouse and factory ads, not one says that.

The split runs through a single firm. The busiest agency in my German samples offers accountants "Direktvermittlung" and warehouse staff "Arbeitnehmerüberlassung", the legal term for being employed by the agency and lent out to the client.

So "who is your boss?" has a collar-shaped answer. For the accountant, the agency is a matchmaker. For the forklift driver, the agency is the employer. Temp work follows the same line. Among 187 German ads about agency employment, only about 1 in 10 is an office job; the rest are factory, warehouse, building, care or cleaning work. The UK is different: about 1 in 4 of its agency temp ads is for an office, from payroll assistants to executive assistants.

Finding 3: permanent, but with whom?

In Germany, 31 of 187 agency ads offered an open-ended contract with the agency itself and 23 mentioned a chance of being hired by the client; in the UK, 33 of 131 agency temp ads said the job could become permanent.

The stepping stone, the idea that temping gets your foot in the door, is the agencies' best argument. In the ads it is a minority promise: about 1 in 8 in Germany and 1 in 4 in the UK. It is also written softly. An "Option auf Übernahme", a "gute Übernahmechance", "Temporary to Permanent", "with the potential to go permanent". An option, a chance, a potential.

Germany adds a twist. About 1 in 6 German agency ads offers security, just not at the factory: "Unbefristete Festanstellung im Rahmen der Arbeitnehmerüberlassung", a permanent job as a leased worker. You stay on the agency's payroll for good, and the agency decides where you go next. One ad even promises a "Wechselgarantie", a swap guarantee: if you are unhappy at the client, they move you somewhere else.

In Italy, two agencies write the bridge into their standard contract line. They describe their placements, again and again, as an "iniziale contratto di somministrazione, con scopo assunzione diretta in azienda": an initial agency contract, with the aim of direct hire by the company. Aim, not promise.

What it means

If you are looking for work:

Read the first lines for the contract model. In Germany, "Arbeitnehmerüberlassung" means the agency employs you and "Direktvermittlung" means the client will. In Italy, look for "somministrazione"; in the UK, "temp to perm".
If the ad mentions a route onto the client's payroll, ask what triggers it and when, and get it in writing. In these ads it was an option or a chance, not a contract term.
A permanent agency contract gives you security of pay, not of place. German law limits how long you can be lent to one company and when you must be paid like its own staff, so ask the agency where your assignment stands on both.

If you hire:

If an agency writes your ads, candidates may never see your name. When at least 8 in 10 warehouse ads come through a middleman, and in Germany almost all of them, "direct hire" is a selling point. That is the point the cleaning firm in Trier makes when it prints "KEINE Zeitarbeit" in capitals.
For office roles, candidates expect a recruiter in the middle. The question they will ask is whether the road ends on your payroll.

How I did it

The setup is one line in Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http teppek https://mcp.teppek.com/mcp

Any agent that speaks MCP can do the same. Searching needs no account.

Then I asked, in plain language:

"Show me live warehouse, forklift and factory job ads in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, the UK, France and Spain, searching each country in its own language."
"Do the same for accountants in Germany and finance and admin clerks in the Netherlands."
"For each ad: did the company where the work is post it, or an agency or recruiter?"
"Among agency ads, which ones promise a permanent job, and with whom?"

Behind those questions the agent called two tools. search_listings returns matching ads 50 at a time for a country and a set of keywords; get_listing opens a single ad, which I used to check pay figures and to find the city pages linked below. The agent then read the opening lines of every ad and sorted them.

The rules I applied:

Count advertisers. Where one advertiser posted more than 4 in 10 of a country's sample, the country's share is not reported as a finding. Italy is shown without its largest advertiser; France and Spain are left out.
When in doubt, count it as direct. If an ad's opening did not show that an agency or recruiter posted it, it counts as a direct employer.
Only what the ad says up front. The text available is the opening of each ad, so "mentions" means mentioned in the first lines.
Only stated pay. Hourly rates come from employer-stated pay; estimated salaries were dropped.
No names. Agencies and employers are described, never named.

Try it yourself

Connect the endpoint above and ask your own version: "Who is posting the forklift jobs around Berlin this week, agencies or employers?" or "Which agency ads near me promise a permanent job with the client?" You can also browse areas on the map, for example jobs in Berlin Reinickendorf or Lauf an der Pegnitz. Search works without an account. With the user's permission (OAuth), an agent can also message the people behind a listing or post one; the setup is described at https://www.teppek.com/auth.md.

If you would rather not set anything up, tell me a job and a city in the comments and I will check who is posting the ads for it this week.

Methodology

Date: live job ads on teppek, pulled 5 November 2026; the ads were posted between 6 October and 4 November 2026.
Countries: findings for Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom; France and Spain were pulled and left out because one advertiser posted most of each sample.
Warehouse and factory samples: the first results of a search for the main job titles in each country's language (picker, forklift driver, warehouse worker, machine operator, production worker): Germany 150, Netherlands 50, Italy 50, Poland 45 and the UK 37 after removing managers and shop-floor retail roles.
Office samples: Germany 44 accounting and bookkeeping ads; Netherlands 50 finance and admin ads.
Agency-work samples: Germany 187 ads that mention agency employment or a staffing firm; UK 131 agency ads that describe the job as temporary.
Classification: an ad counts as agency or recruiter when the advertiser is a staffing, recruitment or placement firm or the ad says it is hiring for a client; otherwise it counts as direct. Job type comes from the job title.
Advertisers: Germany warehouse sample 55 advertisers, largest 23 of 150; Netherlands largest 6 of 50; Poland largest 14 of 45; UK largest 6 of 37; Italy largest 22 of 50, shown without it (27 of 28); German agency-work sample 65 advertisers, largest 26 of 187; UK agency temp sample 75 advertisers, largest 17 of 131.
Pay: German hourly rates from employer-stated pay only, 90 agency ads; €13.90 is Germany's statutory minimum wage for 2026.
Limits: one day of data, not a trend; samples are the first results of a search, not random; only the opening of each ad (about 500 characters) was read, so promises made further down are missed and every "mentions" figure is a minimum; the ads come from job boards and carry a salary figure, and agencies post often on job boards, so the shares describe these live ads, not every vacancy in a country (jobs filled through company websites, word of mouth or public job centres are not all here).

How to cite

Source: teppek live listings, pulled 5 November 2026 (https://www.teppek.com)

Frequently asked questions

How many warehouse job ads in Europe come from agencies?
In live ads on teppek on 5 November 2026, agencies or recruiters posted 144 of 150 German warehouse and factory ads, 48 of 50 in the Netherlands, 37 of 45 in Poland and 30 of 37 in the UK. In Italy, 27 of 28 came from agencies once the largest advertiser was set aside.

Are office jobs also filled through agencies?
Mostly, in these ads: 37 of 44 German accounting ads and 43 of 50 Dutch finance and admin ads came from agencies or recruiters. The difference is the model: 9 of the 44 German accountant ads said "Direktvermittlung" (the client hires you), while none of 150 warehouse ads did.

Do agency jobs lead to a permanent job?
Sometimes, and the ads say so softly. 23 of 187 German agency ads mentioned a chance of being hired by the client and 33 of 131 UK agency temp ads said "temporary to permanent". In Germany, 31 of 187 offered an open-ended contract with the agency itself.

Originally published at teppek Insights, with charts and the full data note.

UK warehouse pay: 4 in 10 job ads offer within 50p of the minimum wage

Yuksel Pamuk — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 05:36:12 +0000

On 4 November 2026, 35 of 86 live UK warehouse and forklift job ads on teppek started within 50p of the £12.71 legal minimum, and in the North of England it was 13 of 15.

Warehouses are hiring for the busiest weeks of their year. If you run one, you need to know what rate will actually fill a shift. If you are looking for work, you want to know whether £12.71 an hour is the going rate or a lowball offer. Pay surveys tell you what people earned last year. Job ads tell you what employers are offering right now.

So I asked an AI agent to pull every live UK warehouse and logistics job ad on teppek and read the pay line in each one. Here is what live postings say this week.

How I did it

The setup is one line. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http teppek https://mcp.teppek.com/mcp

Any agent that speaks MCP can do the same. Searching does not need an account.

Then I asked, in plain language:

"Show me every UK job posting in the logistics and warehouse category."
"Which ones write an hourly rate in the ad? When the ad gives a range, take the lowest number."
"Split them by role: warehouse operatives, forklift and truck operators, drivers. Then by region and by shift."
"Who posted them? Is one advertiser behind most of a group?"

Behind those questions the agent called two tools. search_listings with a country and a category returns the matching postings 50 at a time; there were 393 in the category that day. get_listing opens a single posting so you can read the full ad.

The rules I applied:

Only pay the employer wrote. I used the hourly rate written in the ad text and dropped the 41 ads that only carried an estimated salary.
The starting rate. "£13.20 to £15.39 per hour" counts as £13.20. Higher numbers in a range are usually night, weekend or overtime rates.
Count advertisers. One staffing agency posted 20 of the 86 warehouse ads, so I checked every result without it too.
Small groups are examples, not findings. Any group under 15 ads is named with its number and nothing more.
Open the outliers. The highest rate and the ads quoting exactly the legal minimum were opened and read in full.

That left 86 warehouse and forklift ads and 49 driver ads with an hourly rate in the employer's own words.

Finding 1: 4 in 10 warehouse ads start within 50p of the legal minimum

On 4 November 2026, 35 of 86 live UK warehouse and forklift job ads on teppek offered a starting rate within 50p of the £12.71 National Living Wage, and 15 offered exactly £12.71.

The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over has been £12.71 an hour since April 2026. No ad in the sample went below it, and many sat right on it: 58 of the 86 were within £1.

The middle of the market is £13.45 an hour, which is about £28,000 a year on a 40-hour week. The top quarter starts at £13.98, so £14 an hour is already a top-quarter offer.

The 15 ads at exactly £12.71 came from 14 different advertisers, in towns from Carlisle and Jarrow to Slough and Tunbridge Wells. Paying the legal floor is common practice across the country, not one firm's policy.

Most of this hiring goes through agencies. The 86 ads came from 39 advertisers, and the five busiest are all staffing agencies. The largest posted 20 of the 86; without it, 29 of the remaining 66 ads (44%) are still within 50p of the minimum. In their opening lines, 28 of the 86 ads describe the work as temporary, temp or ongoing work, and 15 say permanent.

The highest starting rate was a freezer warehouse job in Kent, working at temperatures down to minus 21 degrees, at £16.26 to £28.73 an hour depending on shift.

Finding 2: a forklift licence is worth about 80p an hour, a driving job about £3.80

On 4 November 2026, live UK forklift and truck operator ads on teppek offered a median £14.00 an hour against £13.20 for warehouse operatives, and van and HGV driver ads offered £17.00.

Warehouse operatives (pickers, packers, loaders, sorters): median £13.20 an hour, 65 ads. Half of them (33 of 65) start within 50p of the minimum.
Forklift and truck operators (reach, counterbalance, bendi, low-level order pickers): median £14.00, 21 ads. Only 2 of the 21 start within 50p of the minimum.
Van and HGV drivers: median £17.00, 49 ads. One staffing agency posted 19 of these; without it the median is £16.34 across 30 ads.

The 80p gap is worth about £1,660 a year on a 40-hour week. A forklift licence is a short course, and it moves an applicant out of the group most likely to be offered the floor. For employers, the gap is the price of a skill they cannot fill from the general pool.

Shifts are harder to price from ads. Only 10 ads were for fixed night shifts, too few to measure a night premium. The 28 day-shift ads had a median of £13.35. Where one ad lists both, the gap is visible: a picking job in Northampton pays £13.20 an hour on days and £15.39 on nights.

Finding 3: in the North, almost every warehouse ad sits at the floor

On 4 November 2026, 13 of 15 live warehouse and forklift ads in the North of England and Yorkshire started within 50p of £12.71, against 16 of 48 in the Midlands.

In the North West, Yorkshire and the North East the median starting rate was £12.76, and 7 of the 15 ads offered exactly £12.71. They came from 13 different advertisers, in places such as Warrington, Manchester, Bolton, Wigan, Doncaster, Batley, Brighouse, Jarrow, Carlisle and Scunthorpe.

The Midlands is where most of the hiring is: 48 of the 86 ads, around Northampton, Coventry, Rugby, Lutterworth, Kettering, Nottingham and Wolverhampton. The median there was £13.62, and two in three ads started more than 50p above the floor. One likely reason, which the ads alone cannot prove: where many distribution sites recruit from the same towns, the minimum is not enough to fill shifts.

London and the South East had 14 ads, with a median of £13.47. That is no higher than the Midlands, but 14 ads are too few to call it a finding.

What it means

For employers hiring warehouse staff:

£13.45 an hour is the middle of the market this week, and £14 puts you in the top quarter. At £12.71 you are offering the same rate as 15 of the 86 ads.
In the Midlands the bar is higher (median £13.62). The North is where a floor-rate offer still looks like everyone else's.
If you pay more for nights, put both rates in the first lines of the ad. Few ads do, and the ones that do show the gap clearly.

For people looking for warehouse work:

£12.71 is the legal floor, not the going rate. In the Midlands most ads start above £13.
A forklift licence moves the typical offer from £13.20 to £14.00 an hour; a driving licence for vans or HGVs moves it to about £17.
When an ad shows a range, the first number is usually the day rate. Ask what the night and weekend rates are.

Try it yourself

Connect the endpoint above and ask your own version: "What do warehouse jobs around Northampton pay this week?" or "Which forklift jobs near Gloucester state an hourly rate?" You can also browse areas on the map, for example jobs around Northampton or Gloucester. Search works without an account. With the user's permission (OAuth), an agent can also message the people behind a listing or post one; the setup is described at https://www.teppek.com/auth.md.

If you would rather not set anything up, tell me a role and a UK town in the comments and I will pull this week's rates for it.

Methodology

Date: live postings on teppek, pulled 4 November 2026; the ads were posted between 5 October and 3 November 2026.
Country and category: United Kingdom, logistics and warehouse jobs, all 393 postings in the category that day.
Pay: employer-stated pay only (41 ads with estimated pay dropped); hourly rate taken from the ad text; lowest number of a range used; 4 repeated ads (same advertiser, title, rate and town) counted once.
Sample: 86 warehouse and forklift ads and 49 van and HGV driver ads with an hourly rate in the ad; office, supervisor and management roles left out.
Roles and regions: role from the job title; region from the ad's location; North and Yorkshire = North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, North East; Midlands = East and West Midlands.
Shifts: an ad counts as night or day only when it offers that single shift; ads offering several shifts are left out of the shift comparison.
Advertisers: 39 advertisers behind the 86 warehouse ads; the largest posted 20, and every headline result holds without it.
Reference rate: UK National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over, £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026.
Limits: one day of data, not a trend; the search reads the opening part of each ad, so a rate written further down is missed; region and shift groups are small (15 and 28 ads); only 10 night-only ads, so no night premium is claimed; agency rates may or may not include holiday pay.

How to cite

Source: teppek live listings, pulled 4 November 2026 (https://www.teppek.com)

Frequently asked questions

What do UK warehouse jobs pay per hour?
In live ads on teppek on 4 November 2026, the middle starting rate for warehouse and forklift jobs was £13.45 an hour, and 35 of 86 ads started within 50p of the £12.71 National Living Wage.

How much more does a forklift licence pay?
About 80p an hour in this week's ads: forklift and truck operator ads had a median of £14.00 an hour against £13.20 for warehouse operatives, roughly £1,660 a year on a 40-hour week.

Where in the UK do warehouse jobs pay closest to the minimum wage?
In the North of England and Yorkshire: 13 of 15 warehouse and forklift ads on 4 November 2026 started within 50p of £12.71. In the Midlands it was 16 of 48, with a median of £13.62.

Originally published at teppek Insights, with charts and the full data note.

Visa sponsorship in job ads: the UK says no 15 times in 16. Australia says yes 10 times in 13.

Yuksel Pamuk — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:30:14 +0000

I read every live job ad on teppek that mentions visas or sponsorship in five countries on 3 November 2026, and the same word means almost opposite things depending on where the job is.

If you are planning a move abroad for work, "visa sponsorship" is probably the first thing you search for. If you are hiring, you have probably wondered whether saying anything about it helps or scares people off. Both questions have the same problem: most of what you read about sponsorship is policy, not what employers actually write in their ads this week.

So I asked an AI agent to pull the live postings that mention visas in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, and then I read each one. Here is what live postings say this week.

How I did it

The setup is one line. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http teppek https://mcp.teppek.com/mcp

Any agent that speaks MCP can do the same. Searching does not need an account.

Then I asked, in plain language:

"In each of these five countries, find job postings that mention sponsorship, sponsor, sponsored, visa or visas."
"For each one, does the ad offer sponsorship, rule it out, or ask for a visa the candidate already holds?"
"Who posted them? Is one employer behind most of the results?"
"Open the ones with unusual pay and tell me if the number is an hourly rate."

Behind those questions the agent called two tools. search_listings with a country and keywords returns the matching postings and a total count. get_listing opens a single posting so you can read the full record.

The rules I applied:

Read every match. 170 ads matched the keywords. 24 were not about work visas at all (a car dealer that "sponsors local teams", a sales job selling event sponsorships, a restaurant whose name starts with "Visa"). I dropped those, which left 146.
Compare shares inside a country. The postings are the newest ones in each country, so the absolute numbers are not a census.
Count employers. If one employer wrote most of the ads in a group, I say so.
Only salaries the employer wrote. Estimated pay was dropped, and anything that turned out to be an hourly rate is shown per hour.

Finding 1: in the UK, visa sponsorship is mentioned to say no

Live job ads that mention visas or sponsorship, by what they say. Each ad was read one by one.

On 3 November 2026, 15 of the 16 live UK job ads that mention visa sponsorship say it is not available.

The wording is consistent: "unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role", "we are unable to offer certificates of sponsorship to any candidates", "UK applicants only, no sponsorship available".

The refusals cover a wide range of work:

support workers and care team leaders in Worksop, Feltham, Isleworth and Wednesbury
engineers, a plumber and a mechanical supervisor on facilities and utilities contracts, from Wiltshire to Port Talbot
a library customer services assistant, a residential night worker and a senior educational psychologist for a county council
a data engineer in Surrey and a pastoral assistant at a school in Bury St Edmunds

Where the employer wrote the salary, the refusals run from £24k for the pastoral assistant to £59.8k for the educational psychologist. So this is not only entry-level work.

One caution: these 15 ads come from five employers, and three of them (a care provider, a facilities contractor and a county council) wrote 13. Read this as "how UK employers who mention sponsorship tend to phrase it", not as a national rate.

The single UK ad that offered sponsorship was a Dutch-speaking client service role in London, with an €8,000 relocation package on top.

Finding 2: in Australia, the same word mostly means yes

On 3 November 2026, 10 of the 13 live Australian job ads that mention visa sponsorship offer it, and 9 of those 10 are in healthcare.

The offers are for GPs in Cairns, Newcastle and Mount Isa, a senior emergency registrar in Melbourne, an occupational therapist joining a Perth team, a mental health clinician in Bairnsdale, dental assistants in Port Macquarie and podiatrists around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Several name the visa directly ("482 visa sponsorship available"), and one GP role offers permanent residency sponsorship. The one non-health offer was a lead welder for industrial refrigeration work in Brisbane.

The pay the employers wrote is not small: A$55k for a dental assistant, A$120k for the mental health clinician, A$200k for the emergency registrar. The Cairns GP role pays A$250 an hour on weekdays; I opened that one because its yearly figure was exactly 250 × 2080, which is an hourly rate multiplied by a full year.

The three Australian refusals were a sous chef in Brisbane, a finance analyst in Sydney and a practice nurse in Canberra. One detail stood out: the same recruiter offered sponsorship for the regional Victoria mental health role and ruled it out for the Sydney finance role. In these ads, sponsorship follows the job and the place, not the employer.

The 10 offers came from seven different advertisers. The largest, a GP recruiter, posted three.

Finding 3: in New Zealand, the ad usually wants a visa you already have

On 3 November 2026, 65 of the 82 live New Zealand job ads that mention visas ask candidates to hold a valid work or working holiday visa already, and only 15 offer sponsorship.

New Zealand stands out for how often visas come up at all: 82 of 2,103 postings, about 4%, compared with less than 1% in each of the other four countries.

Most of those ads are seasonal work: 37 of the 65 are farm, orchard and vineyard jobs, such as dairy farm assistants in Southland, kiwifruit thinning in the Bay of Plenty and vineyard work around Auckland. The typical line is "must have a valid working holiday visa", sometimes with the reverse rule spelled out ("seasonal work visas not accepted"). One advertiser wrote 13 of those 65 ads, all with the same phone number. Without them, 52 ads remain, in more than 40 different ad texts.

Of the 15 offers, 10 came from one dental recruiter (dentists, a periodontist and an orthodontist from Gore to Wellington). The other five were a different kind of offer: housekeepers, carpenters, plasterers and meat process workers, where sponsorship is "possible" or offered "for the right candidate".

Finding 4: the US says no, and Canada's offers are for jobs in the US

On 3 November 2026, 13 of the 15 live US job ads that mention visas rule out sponsorship, and every Canadian ad that offered a visa was for a nursing job in the United States.

In the US, six of the 13 refusals came from one media company hiring producers, meteorologists and journalists, all with the same sentence about working "without employment-based immigration sponsorship, now or in the future". The other seven came from seven different firms, mostly in tech and finance ("No H-1B sponsorship", "no sponsorship, no OPT"). The one exception welcomed candidates who need an H-1B transfer for a 12-month developer contract in New York.

Canada is the surprise. 15 Canadian ads offered visa sponsorship, posted in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto. All 15 came from one healthcare staffing firm, and all 15 were recruiting Canadian nurses to work in US hospitals on TN or EB3 visas. I opened one to confirm: "Interested in becoming a United States Registered Nurse?" For jobs in Canada itself, I found no sponsorship offers and five ads saying no.

What it means

For job seekers:

In the UK and US, an ad that mentions sponsorship is far more likely to be ruling it out. If the ad says nothing, do not assume a yes; ask early.
In Australia, the offers sit in healthcare and in regional towns. If you are a clinician, the regional ads are where the word "sponsorship" means yes.
In New Zealand, check which visa an ad accepts before you apply. A lot of seasonal work wants a working holiday visa and says other visa types will not be considered.
If an ad in one country offers a visa for another, read it twice. In Canada this week, every offer was for the US.

For employers:

Very few ads mention sponsorship at all: under 1 in 100 in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. If you do sponsor, saying it in the first lines of the ad makes it stand out.
If you do not sponsor, the UK refusals show the clear way to say it: one sentence, early, with what you need instead ("a current, unrestricted right to work").

Try it yourself

Connect the endpoint above and ask your own version: "Which nursing ads in Australia mention sponsorship this week?" or "Show me jobs around Cairns." You can also browse areas on the map, for example jobs around Cairns or Gore, Southland. Search works without an account. With the user's permission (OAuth), an agent can also message the people behind a listing or post one; the setup is described at https://www.teppek.com/auth.md.

If you would rather not set anything up, tell me a role and a country in the comments and I will check what this week's ads say about visas for it.

Methodology

Date: live postings on teppek, pulled 3 November 2026.
Countries: United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada.
Search: job postings matching any of "sponsorship", "sponsor", "sponsored", "visa", "visas" in the ad text. 170 matches; 24 not about work visas removed; 146 analysed.
Per country (relevant ads / all postings that day): UK 16 / 2,658; Australia 13 / 3,720; New Zealand 82 / 2,103; US 15 / 4,556; Canada 20 / 4,137.
Classification: each ad read and labelled as offers sponsorship, rules it out, or asks for an existing visa.
Employers: counted in every group; where one employer wrote a large part of a group, the text says so.
Salaries: employer-stated only; hourly rates identified (yearly figure divisible by 2080) and shown per hour. US ads had estimated pay only, so no US pay is quoted.
Limits: small samples; the search covers the opening part of each ad, so a sponsorship line near the end of a long ad is not counted, and the rates are a floor. Ads that use only a visa code (for example "482" or "AEWV") without the words above are missed. One day of data; this is not a trend.

How to cite

Source: teppek live listings, pulled 3 November 2026 (https://www.teppek.com)

Frequently asked questions

Do UK job ads offer visa sponsorship?
Rarely, in the ads we read. On 3 November 2026, 15 of the 16 live UK ads on teppek that mention visa sponsorship said it was not available; most of those came from three employers.

Which jobs in Australia offer visa sponsorship?
Mostly healthcare. 9 of the 10 Australian ads offering sponsorship on 3 November 2026 were for GPs, an emergency registrar, allied health and dental roles, many in regional towns such as Cairns, Mount Isa and Bairnsdale.

What do New Zealand job ads say about visas?
Most ask for a visa you already hold. 65 of the 82 New Zealand ads that mentioned visas on 3 November 2026 required a valid work or working holiday visa; 37 of those were farm, orchard and vineyard jobs.

Originally published at teppek Insights, with the full data note.

I asked an AI agent where employers are struggling to hire. Here is what 18,000 live job postings say.

Yuksel Pamuk — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:21:39 +0000

Five countries, one afternoon, no spreadsheets. And a lesson about who is really posting those jobs.

Salary guides and "skills shortage" reports are usually a year old by the time you read them. I wanted to see what employers are asking for this week, in which cities, and what they are willing to pay.

So I connected an AI agent to teppek, a live map of jobs, vehicles and local services, and asked it questions in plain language. This article is what came back, and how I checked it.

How I did it

The setup is one line. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http teppek https://mcp.teppek.com/mcp

Any agent that speaks MCP can do the same. Searching does not need an account.

Then I asked things like:

"Which job categories have the most new postings in Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands?"
"For the biggest category in each country, which cities are the postings in, who is posting them, and what do they pay?"
"Software developer postings in these countries, only where the employer wrote the salary in the ad."
"Open the postings with unusually high pay and tell me if the number is an hourly rate."

Behind those questions the agent called two tools. search_listings with a country and a category returns the matching postings plus a count for every category in that country. get_listing opens a single posting so you can read the full ad.

I set four rules before I trusted any number:

Only salaries the employer wrote in the ad. Many job sites fill in an estimate when the employer leaves it blank. I dropped those.
Compare shares inside a country, not raw counts across countries. The postings are the newest ones in each country, so the mix tells you where hiring is busy. The absolute numbers are not a census.
Check who is posting. One recruiter can post the same role fifty times. Before calling something a gap, I looked at how many different employers were behind it.
Open the outliers. If a salary looked too high, I opened the ad. More often than not it was an hourly contract rate multiplied by a full year.

That last rule changed almost every headline I was about to write.

Where the hiring pressure is

These are employer-side signals: where companies are posting the most jobs right now. A true shortage would also need the candidate side, so read this as "where employers are busiest", not as an official shortage list.

Australia: health and care, and mostly outside the big cities.
Health and nursing jobs are 46% of all new Australian postings, by far the largest category. But one medical recruiter posted 63 of the 100 I checked: locum GP and emergency doctor shifts in regional towns like Clarence Valley, Port Augusta, Dalby, East Gippsland and Lismore, paid by the hour.
Take that recruiter out and the picture is still clear. Nurses, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, aged care and disability support workers, posted by many different employers, in places like Alice Springs, Kalgoorlie, Forbes, Dubbo, Tamworth, Toowoomba and Nhill. The middle stated salary for those roles is A$114k.

United Kingdom: warehouses, delivery and schools.
Logistics and warehouse jobs are the largest UK category at 14% of new postings. They are warehouse operatives, delivery drivers and forklift drivers in distribution towns such as Coventry, Gloucester, Wellingborough, Newark and Dunstable, mostly around £28k.
Teaching is 8% of UK postings: teaching assistants, subject teachers and tutors in Southampton, Luton, East London and Liverpool, with a middle stated salary of about £34k. Two education agencies posted 19 of the 50 I checked, so a lot of school hiring is going through agencies.

Canada: tech, concentrated in Toronto and Montréal.
IT is the largest Canadian category at 16% of new postings. Most are in Toronto and Montréal, many posted by IT staffing firms, with a middle stated salary of C$135k. 26 of the 45 with a salary were hourly rates, which usually means a fixed-term contract (more on that below).

Netherlands: making, fixing and moving things.
Among postings with a category, manufacturing, engineering and logistics together make up 56%. One warning from rule 3: 47 of the 50 engineering postings I checked were the same maintenance technician role from a single employer, at about €33k. A category can look like a nationwide gap when it is one company hiring at scale.

Germany: most German postings in the data do not carry a category, so I left Germany out of this part rather than guess.

What developers are offered right now

Employer-stated annual salaries in live software developer ads: lowest, middle and highest.

I also looked at software developer postings with an employer-stated salary. 108 postings made it through the filters.

Country	Postings	Range in the ads	Middle of the sample
United Kingdom	7	£40k to £100k	£50k
Germany	17	€45k to €80k	€60k
Netherlands	25	€33.6k to €96k	€60k
Australia	14	A$90k to A$208k	A$116k
Canada, permanent	7	C$96.6k to C$125k	C$100k
Canada, contract	38	C$60 to C$100 per hour	C$85 per hour

Annual base salary as written in the ad. Small samples, so read it as a snapshot.

A few things stood out:

In Canada, most developer salaries are hourly contracts. 38 of 45, nearly all in Toronto and Ontario, 33 of them from two staffing firms. One I opened was an 11 month onsite role at C$90 to C$95 an hour. Multiplied by a year that looks like C$187k. The permanent roles were C$96.6k to C$125k.
Germany and the Netherlands share a middle of about €60k, but the Dutch range is wider: industrial software roles in the low €30ks, .NET roles in Amsterdam up to €96k. Eight of those .NET roles came from one recruiter.
The UK has the biggest junior to senior jump: a junior developer in London at £40k, a senior software engineer in London at £90k, a .NET team lead in Reading at £100k.
The US is not in the table because 48 of the 50 US developer postings I checked only showed an estimated salary, not one from the employer.

What I take from it

The most useful thing the agent did was not finding the jobs. It was helping me check them: who posted them, whether the salary was a real annual number, and where they really were.

If you are hiring, budget by city and contract type, not by country. If you are job hunting, compare like with like: an hourly contract with an end date is a different offer from a permanent role.

Try it yourself

If you build with AI agents, connect the endpoint above and ask your own questions. Search works without an account. With the user's permission (OAuth), an agent can also message the people behind a listing or post one.

If you would rather not set anything up, tell me a role and a city in the comments and I will pull the same snapshot for you.

Methodology

Date: live postings on teppek, pulled 3 November 2026.
Countries: Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Germany. US developer postings were checked but left out of the pay table because they carried estimated pay only.
Sample: about 18,000 live postings for the category shares; 108 software developer postings with an employer-stated salary for the pay table.
Filters: employer-stated salaries only; shares compared inside a country, not raw counts across countries; postings counted per employer; outliers opened, and yearly figures that were hourly rates shown per hour.
Limits: employer-side signal only, so read it as where employers are busiest, not an official shortage list. Most German postings carry no category, so Germany is left out of the category part. Small pay samples. One day of data; this is not a trend.

How to cite

Source: teppek live listings, pulled 3 November 2026 (https://www.teppek.com)

Frequently asked questions

Where are employers posting the most jobs in Australia?
In health and care. On 3 November 2026, health and nursing jobs were 46% of new Australian postings on teppek, many of them in regional towns; one medical recruiter posted 63 of the 100 we checked.

What do software developer job ads offer in Germany and the Netherlands?
About €60k in the middle of both samples, using employer-stated salaries only on 3 November 2026: €45k to €80k across 17 German postings and €33.6k to €96k across 25 Dutch postings.

Why do Canadian developer salaries look so high in job ads?
Most are hourly contracts. 38 of the 45 Canadian developer postings with a stated salary on 3 November 2026 were hourly, at C$60 to C$100 per hour; the permanent roles were C$96.6k to C$125k.

Originally published at teppek Insights, with the full data note.