Key points:
- Foreign interest in jobs in Ireland – measured through cross-border searches – has been trending upwards since May 2021.
- This rise coincides with a period of increasing immigration to the country
- The United States has been the third most popular origin country of foreign searches in Ireland in 2025, and also saw the largest increase in its share of foreign clicks
After reaching a low of 6.2% of all searches in May 2021, foreign jobseeker interest in jobs in Ireland – measured by the share of searches on the Indeed Ireland website made by jobseekers whose IP addresses were not in Ireland – roughly doubled to 12.3% by April 2025.
This aligns with recently published government data showing immigration to Ireland reached a 17-year high in the year to April 2024. As noted previously, the Irish government issued 27% more employment permits in 2024 than in 2023, helping attract immigrant workers to fill shortages in essential sectors including healthcare, tech, agriculture and hospitality.
But while current levels are roughly double their recent low, they also remain below their recent peak of 14.8%, reached in December 2024. It remains to be seen if this more-recent decline in foreign searches is attributable to seasonality or a longer-term shift in foreign interest.
Conversely, the share of outbound searches from jobseekers in Ireland has been following a downward trend, from just over 10% in December 2023 to 6.9% in April 2025.
By Country
The United States exhibited the most significant annual rise in foreign interest in Irish jobs in the first four months of 2025. In other words, clicks from the United States accounted for a larger percentage of all foreign searches in Ireland (+2.84 percentage points). This was followed by Germany, the Philippines, Morocco and Australia.
The rise in interest in jobs in Ireland among jobseekers in the United States was also evident in the more than 37% increase in raw clicks into Ireland from the U.S. during this period. It also saw the second-highest increase in its share of all cross-border clicks by U.S.-based jobseekers during the same timeframe, preceded only by Canada.
On the other hand, the biggest drop in the share of foreign searches over the same period came from Nigeria (-1.13 percentage points), followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, Zimbabwe and India. This suggests that interest from these countries declined or grew at a slower rate when compared to other countries.
Nonetheless, India and the United Kingdom continue to be among the top three countries of origin for foreign clicks on Irish jobs.
By Occupation
Roughly 1-in-8 foreign clicks were on job postings in the food preparation & service industry, followed by slightly more than 10% in the administrative sector and 9.7% in sales. Jobs in the retail and management sectors saw the largest increase (over 0.5 percentage points) in their share of foreign clicks. In other words, they accounted for a larger portion of all foreign interest in the four months leading up to April 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. They were followed by sales, security & public safety and accounting, respectively.
Occupations in which foreign interest declined relative to earlier norms included human resources, software development, and administrative assistance.
Among the 20 occupations that received at least 1% of all foreign clicks, hospitality & tourism saw the steepest decline. The share of foreign clicks on job postings in this industry dropped by 4.7 percentage points from early 2024 to early 2025.
This was followed by education & instruction (-2.9 percentage points) and production & manufacturing (-2.1 percentage points).
Methodology
This analysis focuses on countries where Indeed has a website, where searches or clicks are recorded, and on the countries of the user’s IP location. This is relevant for defining domestic and cross-border searches and clicks. A domestic search is conducted by a user whose IP location is in the same country as the Indeed website where they conducted the search. A cross-border search is conducted by a user located in a different country than the Indeed website used to perform the search. A click is the user’s action of clicking on a job listing in the search results, which opens the full job description. We interpret this as a demonstration of interest in a specifically listed position. As with searches, click data is anonymised and cannot be linked to users.
