This study investigates the factors that contribute to difficulties that firms face when trying to recruit new employees. We match firm surveys to firm’s tax records and administrative data to see how factors such as industry, location, company size, and employment characteristics affect recruitment difficulties. Our results show that about 10% of the variance in recruitment difficulties can be explained by these observable factors, and up to 14% when considering difficulties from the previous year. However, most of the difficulties encountered by companies are due to factors not captured by our data, which may be related to internal characteristics of the company such as management quality and the recruitment process.