Climbing to an estimated market value of around $50bn, the robotics industry is enjoying its time in the wild.

What’s not so hot, however, is the resulting talent crunch. The hyper-specialised world of intelligent systems and embodied AI is proving tricky to navigate for today’s hiring managers, with demand continuing to outstrip supply.

Now’s the time to start thinking about the hiring journey as a whole:

  1. Is your brand bold enough?

  2. Are you investing in the right hiring models?

  3. Does your interview process reflect the real work?

  4. Do you know what success looks like for this hire?

  5. Do you understand the current talent market dynamics?

Alongside all of this, today’s robotics pioneers are forced to contend with rising startup costs, the need for greater AI adaptability, and even cybersecurity risks.

If you’re in the market for robotics engineers, you’ll likely know this already.

DeepRec.ai are currently supporting several hiring projects across the robotics and embodied AI space, and we’re seeing some familiar themes crop up.

Here are a few ground-level market patterns worth keeping an eye on.

Automation Skills Dominate

Tracking the fastest-growing skills will help you avoid obsolete hiring priorities. In a market hellbent on workforce augmentation, employers start to favour skills-based recruitment a bit more.

Plus, it helps you get an idea of who you should start upskilling. Preparing for the unrecognisable workplace of the future is no mean feat, but investing in (and hiring for) emerging skills is a good place to start.

According to our Talent Insights, here are the fastest-growing skills amongst the world’s robotics engineering population over the last 12 months:

  1. Marketing Automation: +120%

  2. Automator: +100%

  3. Manufacturing Automation: +83%

  4. MS Office Automation: +80%

  5. Applied Machine Learning: +64%

  6. CSS Sprites: +50%

  7. Windows Automation: +44%

  8. Test Automation Frameworks: +43%

  9. Microprocessors: 43%

  10. UI Automation: 41%

What’s striking is how concentrated this list is around automation and operational work. These are the skills teams lean on when systems need to scale, stabilise, and run with less manual intervention.

  • Certain skills become harder to find when more teams need them at the same time. Candidates with those skills start getting multiple approaches, move faster, and become more selective. At that point, the role has effectively tightened, even if the job description still looks ‘normal,’ whatever that is in deep tech.

Hidden Gems

One of the ways teams are easing hiring pressure is by widening their geographic lens. Not everywhere equally, and not blindly remote, but by paying closer attention to where robotics talent supply is still relatively healthy compared to demand.

These tend to be regions with strong engineering foundations, universities, or industrial legacies, but without the same saturation or competition as the usual hotspots. For hiring managers, they’re often overlooked simply because they don’t feature in the default shortlist of cities.

Based on where we’re seeing more balanced supply-demand dynamics, a few locations worth paying closer attention to include:

Germany

  • Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg Region

  • Frankfurt Rhine-Main Metropolitan Area

  • Cologne Bonn Region

Switzerland

  • Lausanne Metropolitan Area

  • Greater Bern Area

  • Lucerne Metropolitan Area

United Kingdom

  • Manchester

  • Greater Leeds Area

  • Greater Glasgow Area

United States

  • Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex

  • New York City Metropolitan Area

  • Detroit Metropolitan Area

P.S. If cross-border recruitment is something you’re exploring, DeepRec.ai supports robotics and embodied AI hiring across the UK, Europe, and the US, and is fully SECO and AUG licensed.

Talk to a Consultant

Retention Troubles?

Fierce competition and challenging environments have helped reduce the average tenure of a robotics engineer to around 1.5 years (as per our LinkedIn data).

Here’s how this lines up with what we’re seeing in the market:

Alternative Hiring Models Are Becoming More Popular  

Statement of Work arrangements, in particular, are gaining traction as robotics projects become more phase-driven and outcomes are easier to define upfront. When outcome-based work is prioritised, tenure will naturally shrink.

Big Name Hunting

In a market shaped by shorter tenures, projects carry weight. Robotics engineers care about what they can point to, what they helped ship, and what they can take with them next. That makes how you frame the work important.

Upskilling

Nowadays, robotics roles almost always require some form of data and/or AI skills from their candidates. Top candidates are always looking to develop their skills, which means switching careers if there are better growth prospects available.

Business Risk 

Hardware startups are notorious for struggling to get off the ground, with Robotics Tomorrow claiming that, in the US, only 24% of them manage to raise a second round of funding. Unsurprisingly, this feeds into shorter tenures. It’s important to reassure candidates by being explicit about runway, funding horizon, and delivery expectations upfront.

The Simulation Gap

A growing number of robotics hires fail not because of skill mismatch, but because teams underestimate the jump from controlled environments to live deployment.

Engineers quickly feel friction when a role is sold as R&D, but the work turns out to be firefighting, or when autonomy looks promising in simulation but struggles on hardware.

This matters for hiring because experienced robotics engineers are acutely aware of this gap. They ask questions about data quality, testing environments, hardware iteration cycles, and how often systems see the real world.

From a market perspective, roles tied to clear deployment paths tend to attract and keep stronger candidates. Engineers want to know where the robot lives, who uses it, how often it fails, and what support exists when it does.

Where Robotics Recruitment Specialists Add the Most Value

In robotics, small misunderstandings get expensive quickly. A good recruiter helps remove them early.

That means sense-checking the role against reality. What’s actually on hardware? How mature is the system? Is the work phase-based or genuinely long-term? Engineers will find this out anyway; the difference is whether they find out before or after joining.

It also means being honest about trade-offs. Funding runway, delivery pressure, safety constraints, and where the risk really sits. When that context is clear upfront, tenure tends to look very different.

This is where specialist recruiters earn their keep. Not by overselling roles, but by shaping them properly and setting expectations that hold once the work starts.

That’s typically how DeepRec.ai supports robotics teams: less noise, more alignment, and fewer surprises on both sides.

If this sounds like something your business could benefit from, please reach out to our resident Robotics & Embodied AI team directly; we’re more than happy to have a confidential conversation about your hiring plans.

Let us know what you’re hoping to achieve, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible: https://www.deeprec.ai/looking-to-hire.