Hiring conditions for these skills are tight, and the pressure is structural rather than seasonal. McKinsey has estimated that the European Union alone could face a technical talent gap of up to 3.9 million people by 2027, with demand for engineering and technical skills running well ahead of supply.¹ Engineers and skilled trades have been among the hardest roles to fill for most of the past decade, and that has not eased.

The picture in chemicals adds a second layer. Europe’s chemical industry is restructuring on a scale not seen in a generation. BASF brought headcount at its Ludwigshafen site below 30,000 for the first time since 1954, and analysts expect further plant closures across the region.² That does not mean the talent has vanished. It means it is moving, often quietly, and the people worth hiring are rarely the ones who end up on a jobs board. On the manufacturing side the pull runs the other way, with rearmament, reshoring and record aerospace order books drawing engineers and technicians into defence and advanced manufacturing, where a large share of the existing workforce is heading toward retirement.³

So the pool is small, it is shifting, and demand for the same profiles is rising in adjacent sectors. That is the environment a generalist agency is being asked to work in when it takes a brief for a specialist role.

It is also more fragmented than an outside recruiter tends to expect. Chemicals is not one talent market but dozens of small ones. Coatings formulation, adhesives, elastomers, base oil and additive technology, catalysis, polymer science and regulatory affairs each have their own pool, their own leading employers and their own salary norms. A recruiter who treats them as interchangeable, or who assumes that experience in one transfers cleanly into another, will produce a shortlist that looks qualified and is not. The same holds in manufacturing, where a maintenance engineer steeped in high volume automotive production is a different animal from one who has run a low volume, high mix aerospace line at a firm such as GKN Aerospace or Rolls-Royce.

What a generalist can and cannot do

None of this is a criticism of generalist recruitment. For high volume and well understood roles, a good generalist agency is efficient and cost effective. If you need to fill a run of similar production or administrative positions where the requirements are clear and the pool is large, keyword matching and a strong process will get you there.

The problem starts when the role carries technical depth that does not show up in a job title. A formulation chemist who has spent a career on waterborne architectural coatings at AkzoNobel is not interchangeable with one who has worked on industrial adhesives at Henkel, even though both will appear under “formulation chemist” in a database. A process engineer from a large integrated site such as one of Ineos or BASF’s complexes brings a different set of instincts to a small specialty batch operation. A lubricants application engineer at Fuchs or Quaker Houghton is solving a different problem from a base oil formulator, though the CVs can read almost identically to an outsider.

A generalist recruiter working at speed cannot reliably tell these apart, because the distinctions live in the work, not in the wording. So they do the sensible thing with the information they have. They match words. The result is a shortlist that looks plausible and falls apart the moment a hiring manager reads it properly, which wastes the one resource nobody has spare in a tight market, which is time.

Where specialist search earns its place

Specialist search is worth the fee in a specific and fairly predictable set of situations.

The first is where the talent pool is genuinely small. If the person you need is one of a few hundred in Europe who have done the specific thing you require, whether that is scale up of a particular class of specialty chemical, regulatory leadership through a REACH dossier, or commercial ownership of a CASE portfolio, then a search that maps the market and reaches those individuals directly is the only approach that works. Advertising cannot reach a pool that is not looking.

The second is where a mis-brief is expensive. Roles that sit close to product safety, regulatory compliance or process integrity carry a cost of failure that goes well beyond the salary. The universal PFAS restriction moving through ECHA is a live example. Companies are hiring reformulation and product development chemists to redesign performance chemistries under long qualification timelines, and the difference between a candidate who has done that work and one who merely claims the keywords is measured in years and product approvals.⁴

The third is where discretion matters. In these sectors the best candidates are usually employed by your competitors, and your competitors may also be your customers. Approaching those people needs judgement about who to contact, how, and how quietly. That is a specialist’s daily work, not a generalist’s.

The commercial roles are just as specialised

It is easy to think of specialist search as a purely technical concern, relevant for chemists and engineers but not for sales. In these sectors that is a mistake. A technical sales or business development hire in specialty chemicals, CASE or lubricants has to hold a credible conversation with a customer’s R&D and procurement teams at the same time. They need enough command of the chemistry and the application to be taken seriously, and enough commercial instinct to turn that credibility into revenue. The pool of people who can genuinely do both is small, and it does not overlap neatly with either the pure technical pool or the general sales pool.

A generalist recruiter will screen a technical sales brief the way they screen any sales role, on billing history, patch and target attainment. Those things matter, but they miss the part that actually decides success here, which is whether the person can walk into a formulation discussion at a coatings or lubricants customer and add value rather than nod along. Distributors such as IMCD and Brenntag, and producers such as Clariant and Evonik, are all competing for exactly these hybrid people, which keeps the pool tight and the good ones employed.

The shift in the chemicals market has sharpened the commercial brief too. With volumes under pressure and margins the priority, the selling motion is moving from shifting product toward defending and growing value in specialty lines. The profile that thrived in a volume market is not automatically the one that thrives now, and a recruiter who understands the sector can read that difference. A generalist working from a job title cannot.

How to tell whether a recruiter is genuinely specialist

The label “specialist” is easy to claim and harder to prove. A few practical tests separate the real thing from a generalist with a niche page on the website.

A genuine specialist can talk about your market without prompting. They know the companies, the sites, the chemistries and the regulations. They can tell you, roughly, where the relevant talent sits and which firms are shedding or growing headcount. They will push back on a brief that is unrealistic, because they know what the market will and will not yield, and they would rather have that conversation at the start than deliver a shortlist of people who do not exist. When you describe the role, they ask about the application and the end market, rather than only the title and the salary band.

A generalist dressed as a specialist will take the brief at face value, promise a fast turnaround, and send CVs that match the advert. There is nothing dishonest in that. It is simply the wrong tool for the job.

Getting more from either route

Whichever way you go, the brief does most of the work. The single most common cause of a failed search is a job description written as a wish list, asking for someone who is simultaneously a deep technical expert, a natural commercial closer and a willing relocator, at a salary that fits one of the three. A specialist recruiter should tell you which of those you can actually have. A generalist rarely will.

Expect a market map before a shortlist. For a hard to fill role, the useful first deliverable is not five CVs but a picture of where the talent sits, how many people realistically fit, what they are paid now, and what it would take to move them. That tells you whether the role is fillable as written or needs rethinking, before anyone has wasted a month.

And be honest about which category your vacancy falls into. Some roles are volume roles and belong with a generalist. Some are specialist roles that will only be filled by someone who understands the field. Sending the second type to the first kind of agency is the most common and most expensive mistake in technical hiring.

A simple way to decide

The table below is a rough guide, not a rule. Most hiring teams already sense which side a role falls on. The value is in acting on that sense rather than defaulting to whoever is easiest to brief.

For a plant operative or a volume commercial role, the left column is the efficient choice. For a principal formulator, a regulatory lead, a plant manager in a tight labour market, or a technical sales hire who has to hold their own with a customer’s R&D team, the right column is the one that fills the role.

The sectors Witan works in, across chemicals, specialty chemicals, CASE, lubricants and industrial manufacturing, sit heavily in that right hand column. The roles are technical, the pools are small, and the margin for a mis-hire is thin. That is precisely where a search built on understanding the field, rather than matching the words, pays for itself.

If you are weighing up how to approach a role that has been open longer than it should be, we are always happy to talk through where a specialist search would help and where a generalist would serve you just as well.