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If you are a CTO, IT manager, or responsible for technology teams, you have probably been through this before: months with an open position, selection processes that go nowhere, or a talent who accepted the offer and left three months later for a company that paid 30% more. You are not alone.
Brazil faces a structural deficit of more than 530,000 IT professionals, and 2025 data shows the problem has gotten worse, not better. With digital transformation accelerating across all sectors and artificial intelligence expanding the demand for technical specialists, the balance between supply and demand for technology talent simply does not add up.
This article brings together the key data on the scenario, analyzes the structural causes of the problem, and presents practical strategies for companies that need to hire, scale, or retain technology professionals in 2025 and 2026.
The Numbers: Brazil Has a Serious IT Workforce Problem
To understand the scale of the problem, you need to start with the data. And the data is, at the very least, concerning.
The Math That Does Not Work: Demand vs. Training
Brazil needs 159,000 new IT professionals per year but graduates only 53,000: this resulted in an accumulated deficit of approximately 532,000 unfilled positions between 2021 and 2025, according to Brasscom.
In practical terms: the Brazilian market would absorb three times more technology graduates than universities deliver each year. And this gap is not new: a Brasscom report published in 2019 already projected a deficit of 420,000 professionals between 2018 and 2024; the accelerated digitalization driven by the pandemic expanded that projection significantly.
Google for Startups, in partnership with Abstartups, points out that Brazil’s lack of digital skills places the country in third position among G20 nations that most waste the opportunity to increase GDP.
The table below summarizes the key indicators:
| Indicator | Number | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Accumulated IT professional deficit (2021–2025) | ~530,000 | Brasscom / Google for Startups |
| IT graduates per year in Brazil | 53,000 | Brasscom |
| Positions needed per year | 159,000 | Brasscom |
| Brazilian companies with difficulty hiring IT professionals | 81% | ManpowerGroup (2025) |
| CTOs who cite recruitment as their main challenge | 64.3% | CTO Insights / Impulso (2025) |
| Companies with shortages across all seniority levels | 50.6% | CTO Insights / Impulso (2025) |
The Deficit Is Not Just About Quantity: It Is About Seniority
The CTO Insights 2025 survey, conducted by Impulso with 110 technology leaders, reveals that 79.3% of CTOs have difficulty hiring or retaining IT professionals, with half of companies reporting shortages across all seniority levels.
The most critical data point, however, relates to seniority: nearly 80% of companies say they have difficulty hiring or retaining IT talent, with the most pronounced impact at senior (37.9%) and mid-level (19.5%) positions, while only 1.2% say they do not perceive significant scarcity.
This means the market can still find junior professionals, with growing difficulty. The real problem lies in who will architect systems, lead squads, and make technically sound decisions: the senior professional has become a scarce resource.
In Brazil, the greatest hiring challenges are in IT and Data (39%), Customer Service (29%), and Marketing and Sales (21%), according to the ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage Survey 2025. Technology leads by a wide margin.
Why Are IT Professionals Scarce in Brazil?
Understanding the causes of the problem is just as important as knowing the numbers. The deficit is not the result of a single factor: it is the sum of structural issues that feed into each other.
1. University Education Does Not Keep Up With Demand
The Brazilian educational system currently graduates less than one third of the professionals the market needs. But the problem goes beyond volume: there is also a relevant curricular gap between what universities teach and what companies actually need.
Technology courses still have heavy theoretical curricula and light practical content in areas like agile development, cloud computing, information security, and artificial intelligence which are exactly the specialties with the highest demand. The result is a graduate who needs 12 to 18 months of hands-on experience before becoming productive in the most critical areas.
2. Brain Drain: The Best Talent Looks Abroad
Remote work opened a window that will not close again. Senior Brazilian professionals now receive offers from North American, European, and Latin American companies, paying in dollars or euros, with competitive working conditions.
As analyzed by Google in its report on the Brazilian startup ecosystem, specialist professionals seek and are constantly targeted for better opportunities and salaries, especially outside the country. The scenario is a consequence of the lack of structure and references in the sector, which leads to disbelief in career possibilities and devalues the Brazilian technology market, making it less attractive for established or newly graduated professionals.
For companies that remain in Brazil, the competition is no longer just with local competitors: it is with the global market.
3. Digital Transformation Accelerated Faster Than Workforce Development
The pandemic compressed five years of digitalization into eighteen months. Companies that had resisted technology were forced to adopt it, creating a sudden and massive demand for professionals that the market simply did not have in sufficient numbers.
According to Google for Startups, the areas with the greatest global talent deficits are information security, artificial intelligence, cloud architecture, and IT automation: exactly the specialties that have grown most in relevance in recent years.
Artificial intelligence, rather than relieving hiring pressure, has amplified it. According to Bain & Company, 39% of Brazilian executives say that the lack of specialized talent is the main factor hampering the advancement of AI initiatives in their companies.
4. The Geographic Concentration of Talent
With 72% of IT professionals concentrated in the Southeast, companies in other regions suffer doubly: fewer available professionals in the local market and greater difficulty competing with the salaries practiced in major urban centers. Curitiba, Florianópolis, Recife, and Porto Alegre have growing technology ecosystems, but still face this imbalance in a significant way.
This data, reported by Economia SP based on Brasscom projections, reinforces that the problem is not uniform across Brazilian territory: it is more acute depending on where the company is located.
The Impact on Companies: What Happens When You Cannot Hire
The numbers above have concrete consequences in the day-to-day operations of organizations. Three impacts stand out consistently across research and reports from technology leaders.
Delayed Projects and Compromised Deliveries
When a critical position stays open for two, three, or four months, the backlog grows. The existing team absorbs pending demands, deadlines slip, and the time-to-market for digital products increases. In sectors where speed is a competitive advantage (fintechs, digital retailers, healthtechs), this delay has a direct cost in revenue and market positioning.
Internal Team Overload and Turnover
External scarcity creates internal pressure. With fewer people and more work, professionals already on the team become overloaded, lose motivation, and open themselves up to other offers. The company enters a vicious cycle: resignation due to overload, new open position, more pressure on those who stayed.
Retaining who is already inside has become just as challenging as hiring from outside. According to the Google for Startups report with Abstartups, 92% of startups believe that the lack of technology professionals impacts the innovation of their businesses, and can even jeopardize company survival.
The Block on the Artificial Intelligence Agenda
This is perhaps the most underestimated impact. As pointed out by the CTO Insights 2025 survey by Impulso, the lack of qualified professionals is cited as the main barrier to AI adoption by 54% of companies: the difficulty is not just about volume, but about qualification, precisely in one of the most strategic areas for the years ahead.
It is not technology that blocks AI in Brazilian companies: it is the absence of people capable of implementing it, integrating it into processes, and ensuring it generates real value. IDC projects that by 2026, more than 90% of organizations will face difficulties due to a lack of IT skills, resulting in estimated losses of US$ 5.5 trillion in delays, quality problems, and lost revenue.
How Companies Are Trying to Solve It and Where Traditional Outsourcing Still Falls Short
As revealed by the CTO Insights survey by Impulso, nearly 90% of companies concentrate hiring in internal HR-led processes, while only 26.4% combine HR and specialized consultancies, and 16.1% turn to external partners to complement internal capacity.
This data reveals a problem of approach: most companies are still trying to solve a structural market problem with tools designed for a market without scarcity.
When outsourcing enters as an alternative, the traditional version of the model often disappoints. The so-called “body shop” operated on a simpler model: the vendor found a professional, placed them with the client, and ended their role there. The result, in many cases, is high turnover, cultural misalignment, no productivity monitoring, and a slow onboarding process that consumes the client manager’s time and energy, with no guaranteed return.
Still according to the Impulso survey, the main motivators for outsourcing include flexibility to adjust team size according to the roadmap (18.4%), rapid capacity increase (14.9%), and reduction of hiring time (14.9%). When asked about what defines a good outsourcing partner, CTOs prioritize technical quality of professionals (63.2%), cost (42.5%), and cultural fit (32.2%).
It is precisely to address these problems with the traditional model that the concept of Outsourcing 2.0 emerged: a model that goes beyond intermediation and includes active productivity management, technical and behavioral validation of professionals before placement, and continuous support by a dedicated Tech Lead. Later in this article, we detail how this model works in practice.
7 Strategies to Hire and Retain IT Talent in 2025
There is no silver bullet for the talent deficit. What exists are smarter strategies that, when combined, create a real competitive advantage in attracting and retaining technology professionals.
1. Specialized Staffing With Active Management
Outsourcing the talent search can be efficient when the right partner offers more than a resume: prior technical validation, structured onboarding, and productivity monitoring. An external Tech Lead who ensures delivery quality reduces client rework and shortens the time until the professional generates real value.
This managed staffing model, developed by NextAge as Outsourcing 2.0, represents a significant evolution over the traditional body shop model.
2. Technical Employer Branding
IT professionals research the company before accepting any offer. An interesting tech stack, active public repositories, a quality tech blog, participation in conferences and hackathons: all of this weighs on the decision of a candidate who has multiple offers in hand. Companies that treat their technical reputation as a strategic asset consistently reduce the cost and time of hiring.
3. Expand the Geographic Criteria
With remote work consolidated, there is no longer a structural reason to limit the search to the radius of the headquarters city. Florianópolis, Recife, Belém, Porto Alegre, and mid-sized cities have qualified professionals, less competed for and, in many cases, with salary expectations more aligned with companies outside the São Paulo axis. Nearshoring (hiring in neighboring countries, especially in Latin America) has also become a viable alternative for specific profiles.
4. Internal Upskilling: Develop Who You Cannot Hire
Hiring a ready-made senior professional on the open market is increasingly difficult and expensive. An alternative increasingly adopted by more mature companies is investing in internal training tracks: mentoring programs, funded certifications, internal academies, and learning squads. The junior or mid-level professional who is well developed costs less, has greater loyalty to the company, and over time becomes exactly the senior that the market cannot deliver.
5. Revisit the Selection Process
Processes with five or more stages, long technical tests without feedback, and weeks of silence between phases drive away exactly the best candidates: those who have multiple options open simultaneously. An agile process (two to three stages, quick feedback, transparent communication) is today a real competitive differentiator, especially for senior profiles.
6. Build a Continuous Talent Pipeline
Do not wait for a position to open before starting to recruit. Maintaining active relationships with technical communities (meetups, LinkedIn groups, technology Discord servers), having a consistent presence at industry events, and cultivating a base of candidates with whom the company already has a relationship drastically reduces time-to-fill when a position opens.
7. Managed Squads for Delivery Demands
When the goal is to deliver a specific project with defined deadlines and scope, hiring a fully managed squad (with tech lead, developers, QA, and, as needed, product manager and UX) can be more efficient and predictable than building the team internally. Capacity management stays with the partner; the company focuses on the result.
NextAge offers this model through Managed Squads: complete, multidisciplinary teams operating in sprints, with direct reporting to the client’s leadership.
NextAge’s Staff Augmentation: IT Staffing With Guaranteed Productivity
The IT outsourcing model has evolved. What was once synonymous with recruitment intermediation, with a vendor passing along a resume and charging a margin, has given way to more sophisticated talent management models.
NextAge’s Staff Augmentation was developed based on 19 years of experience placing technology professionals at companies such as Sicredi, XP Investimentos, Scania, WEG, and more than 600 organizations across different sectors. The model differentiates itself from traditional outsourcing in three central ways:
- Prior technical and behavioral validation. The professionals placed by NextAge do not arrive at the client with a resume and a promise: they arrive with a proven performance history in real projects, validated by the company itself before placement. The client receives a professional who has already demonstrated delivery capability in a technology context, not just a candidate who performed well in an interview.
- Tech Lead monitoring productivity. Each placement includes supervision by a NextAge Tech Lead, who monitors deliveries, identifies bottlenecks, and ensures the professional is generating real value for the client. This point resolves one of the biggest problems with traditional outsourcing: the internal manager does not have to take on sole responsibility for developing and monitoring someone who just joined the team.
- Contractual advantages and qualified replacement. The model includes a discount during the onboarding period and qualified replacement when necessary, reducing risks for the contracting company. If the fit does not work out, the replacement process is handled quickly and without the costs of a new recruitment cycle.
For companies that face the talent deficit on a daily basis, Outsourcing 2.0 functions as a qualified extension of the internal team: without the costs and risks of a formal employment contract, with the agility to scale up or down according to demand, and with the governance of a company with 19 years in the market and more than 600 success stories.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions About the IT Talent Deficit in Brazil
What is the IT professional deficit in Brazil?
According to Brasscom and Google for Startups, Brazil accumulated a deficit of approximately 530,000 technology professionals between 2021 and 2025. The country graduates around 53,000 IT professionals per year, but demand is for 159,000 positions annually: less than one third of what is needed to supply the market.
Why is it difficult to hire IT professionals in Brazil?
The main causes are: insufficient university training to meet market demand, the exodus of senior talent to the international market (brain drain driven by remote work), digital transformation accelerating faster than workforce development, and geographic concentration of available professionals, with 72% of them in the Southeast region, according to Brasscom data.
Which IT profiles are most difficult to hire?
The profiles with the greatest scarcity are senior professionals: 37.9% of companies specifically identify this gap, according to the CTO Insights 2025 survey by Impulso. The most critical specialties are information security, artificial intelligence, cloud architecture, and data engineering, according to Google for Startups.
Does IT outsourcing solve the talent scarcity problem?
Outsourcing can be an efficient strategic solution, as long as the model goes beyond simple intermediation. Models with technical validation of professionals, active productivity management, and monitoring by a dedicated Tech Lead, such as NextAge’s, tend to deliver superior results compared to the traditional outsourcing model, especially in productivity and retention metrics.
How long does it take to hire an IT professional in Brazil?
In the traditional recruitment model, the hiring and onboarding process for IT professionals can take two to four months. Specialized staffing models with pre-validated professionals and structured onboarding, such as that offered by NextAge, significantly reduce this time, accelerating the return on the hiring investment.
What is the difference between NextAge’s Staff Augmentation and traditional outsourcing?
Traditional outsourcing works as recruitment intermediation: the vendor finds a professional and passes them on to the client, ending their role there. Outsourcing 2.0 includes technical and behavioral validation of professionals in prior projects, productivity monitoring by a dedicated Tech Lead throughout the entire placement, and contractual guarantees such as qualified replacement and a discount during the onboarding period.
