This article examines the difficulties anticipated by companies in France when it comes to recruiting staff. We match data from the 2018 and 2019 Besoins en Main‑d’Œuvre surveys on workforce needs with company data from the FARE annual structural statistics of companies from the ESANE scheme and the DADS (Déclaration annuelle de données sociales – Annual Declaration of Social Data) to examine how recruitment difficulties are distributed by sector, location and size of the establishment and employment area characteristics. Together, these factors explain around 6% of the total variation in recruitment challenges, increasing to 14% when incorporating recruitment difficulties reported in the previous year. Most of the recruitment difficulties anticipated thus result from factors not observed in the data used in this article, potentially linked to the internal characteristics of each establishment, such as the quality of management and specific recruitment processes.