Georgia Job Vacancies Fall 8.1% as IT Hiring Caves In

Georgia’s biggest online jobs board cooled in April, with 6,234 vacancies posted on jobs.ge, an 8.1% drop from March and a 5.2% decline from the same month a year earlier, according to the PMCG Research Center, a Tbilisi economic consultancy that tracks the platform monthly. Logistics, transport and distribution took the steepest one-month hit, falling 12.1%.

Read the rolling data instead of the single month, though, and a different signal sits underneath the headline. The category shedding postings fastest on an annual basis is not logistics. It is information technology and programming, down 17.0% from April a year ago, and that number traces straight back to the wave of foreign tech workers who arrived after 2022 and have since started leaving.

The Headline Number Versus the Rolling Trend

A single month of hiring data is a noisy thing. Seasonal patterns, public holidays and the timing of large recruitment drives all push the count around. April’s 8.1% slide looks sharp in isolation, yet the three-month picture points the other way.

Between February and April 2026, employers published 19,403 vacancies on jobs.ge, up 5.8% against the same stretch of 2025. So the platform is busier year-on-year across the quarter even as April itself fell back. The split between the monthly drop and the quarterly gain is the first thing the wire coverage tends to flatten.

The category table makes the divergence clearer. Logistics owns the worst monthly move, but IT owns the worst annual one, and sales sits alone in positive territory.

IT posted the smallest monthly decline of any major sector, off just 6.4%. That looks resilient until you set it beside the annual figure, where the same category leads every other on the way down.

IT and Programming’s 17% Annual Slide

The IT line is where the structural story lives. A 6.4% monthly dip is the kind of wobble any sector posts. A 17.0% fall against the prior year, sustained while the wider platform grows over the quarter, is a trend rather than a blip.

That gap matters because Georgia’s information technology (IT) sector spent the last three years as the country’s loudest growth story. From 2022 to 2024 the number of information and communications technology (ICT) firms registered in the country nearly doubled. The vacancy boards filled with developer, support and product roles aimed at a workforce that had landed almost overnight.

The cooling now showing up in postings is not unique to Georgia. Global tech employers have spent the past two years trimming headcount and rerouting budgets toward automation, a shift visible in moves such as Salesforce cutting roughly 1,000 jobs to fund an AI pivot. But Georgia’s case has a local engine that the global narrative misses, and it has little to do with chatbots.

The roles drying up are the ones that were created for an imported labor pool. As that pool thins, the postings thin with it, and the 17.0% number is the cleanest measure of how quickly the unwind is happening.

How the 2022 Relocation Wave Inflated the Hiring Counts

After Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tens of thousands of Russian and Belarusian IT specialists relocated to Georgia, drawn by visa-free entry, low taxes and a fast company-registration process. Much of the sector’s headline expansion rode on that influx rather than on homegrown firms scaling up.

The composition of the boom tells you why it was fragile.

• 99% of the firms registered during the 2022 to 2024 surge were small businesses or sole proprietorships, according to the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI), a Tbilisi governance watchdog.
• 56% of IT companies operating in the country are owned by Russian nationals.
• Just 18 new IT companies registered in 2025, a near-stall after the doubling of the prior years.
• IT exports fell 9.2% in 2024 to about GEL 1.9 billion (roughly $700 million), as revenue at large global providers slipped.

Sole proprietors and one-person shops do not run sustained hiring campaigns. When the people behind them started moving on after 2024, there was no deep base of scaling employers left to keep the vacancy counts up. The IDFI analysis of the ICT sector’s economic footprint flagged minimal tax revenue, low commercialization and high turnover as reasons the boom never put down roots, and the April vacancy data is what that diagnosis looks like in real time.

Sales and Procurement Carried the Quarter

While IT contracted, sales did the opposite. Sales and procurement was the only major category to post annual growth in April, up 5.7%, and across the February-to-April window it was the single biggest driver of the platform’s overall gain.

The three-month breakdown shows where the demand actually sits:

• 5,017 vacancies in sales and procurement, up 12.8% year-on-year, the largest contributor to the quarter’s increase.
• 4,194 vacancies in finance and statistics, up 11.7%.
• 4,443 vacancies in administration and management, up 5.6%.

Those are domestic, consumer-facing and back-office roles, tied to retail activity, services and local company operations rather than to an imported specialist workforce. The rotation is the quieter half of the report: hiring is not collapsing, it is moving away from the migration-fed tech roles and toward the parts of the economy that were already here.

Finance Hiring Rises While Logistics Pulls Back

The finance and statistics jump deserves a second look, because it runs against the grain of what large banks are signaling elsewhere. In Western Europe, lenders are mapping deep automation of back-office work, with one forecast warning that AI could erase up to 200,000 European banking jobs by 2030. Georgia’s finance vacancies, by contrast, climbed 11.7% over the quarter.

The likely reason is stage of development. Georgian banks and financial firms are still building out branch networks, compliance teams and analytics functions rather than automating mature ones, so headcount is expanding where richer markets are trimming.

Logistics tells the inverse story for the month. Its 12.1% drop was the largest single-month fall of any category, a swing consistent with the lumpy, project-driven nature of transport and distribution hiring, where a handful of large recruitment pushes can dominate one month and vanish the next.

What the sector spread shows, taken together, is an economy reallocating rather than retrenching. The roles tied to the most fragile source of growth are fading, and the roles tied to everyday domestic activity are filling the space.

A Labor Market Still Adding Salaried Jobs

For all the noise in the vacancy data, the broader employment picture stayed firm. The number of salaried employees in Georgia reached 1,012,141 in April, up 2.1% from a year earlier, even as the platform’s vacancy count slipped and the country’s unemployment rate ticked higher in the first quarter.

If the sales and finance rotation holds through the next two monthly readings, April’s dip will look like the seasonal wobble it probably is. If the IT line keeps sliding at a double-digit annual pace, the relocation boom that flattered Georgia’s tech numbers will have finished unwinding, and the country’s next IT growth story will have to be built by employers who plan to stay.