Spain has never had more people in work. In the second quarter of 2026 the national statistics institute counted 22.78 million people employed and an unemployment rate of 9.87 percent, the lowest reading since the start of 2008. If you are job hunting from outside the country, that headline is genuinely encouraging. A tighter labour market makes employers willing to look at candidates they would have skipped three years ago.

It also hides the two things that actually decide whether your application goes anywhere. One is whether the employer can legally hire you. The other is whether your CV reads like something a Spanish recruiter recognises. Neither has much to do with how good you are at the job.

This guide covers the search. Where roles are advertised, how applications get screened, and what a Spanish employer expects to see. The immigration side is a separate discipline and we say who to ask about it at the end.

Where jobs in Spain are actually advertised

The Spanish market is more fragmented than the UK or German ones, and the international boards only show you part of it.

InfoJobs is the domestic generalist and carries a volume of Spanish listings that no international site matches. Plenty of small and mid-sized employers post there and nowhere else.

LinkedIn is where recruiters and larger international employers work, and it is usually the better route for English-speaking roles. Our comparison of LinkedIn Jobs covers what it does well and where it leaves gaps.

Tecnoempleo is the specialist board for technology roles and worth checking directly if you work in software, data or infrastructure.

Company career pages matter more in Spain than the board coverage suggests. Larger employers frequently list a role on their own site days before it appears anywhere else, and some never syndicate it at all.

SEPE, the public employment service, and the regional equivalents carry public sector and subsidised roles that rarely surface on commercial boards.

ETTs, the temporary work agencies, place a meaningful share of entry and mid-level hires. Registering with two or three in your city is normal practice rather than a last resort.

A practical note on geography. Madrid and Barcelona carry most of the international and English-speaking roles, Valencia and Málaga have grown quickly in technology, and Bilbao and Zaragoza hold strong industrial and engineering employers. Filtering nationally and then narrowing by city usually beats searching one city from the start.

The filter nobody puts in the advert

If you need permission to work in Spain, the real constraint is that most employers have never sponsored anyone and do not want to learn how on your application. They will not say this in the listing. You find out after three rounds.

The employers who do sponsor tend to share a profile. They are larger, they already employ people from outside the EU, and they hire into roles where the domestic candidate pool is thin. In practice that means technology, engineering, healthcare, research, and specialist finance. Multinationals with a Spanish office are more likely to have the internal process already built.

You can read this off a job advert with a little practice. An English-language listing, a role that mentions relocation support, or an employer with careers pages in several countries are all decent signals. A Spanish-only listing at a company with one office and forty staff is usually not worth the hour it takes to apply well.

This filtering is tedious and it is the part we built AI job matching to do. The point is to spend your applications on employers who can actually hire you.

Writing a CV a Spanish employer recognises

Spanish CV conventions differ from British, American and German ones in ways that get noticed.

Write in Spanish unless the listing is in English or the employer is an international company working in English. A Spanish-language CV signals that you can function in a Spanish-speaking office, which is often the unspoken question.

A photo is conventional. It is not legally required and some modern employers have moved away from it, but a plain head and shoulders photograph is still expected across much of the market, particularly outside technology.

Two pages is normal and not a failure of editing. Spanish CVs run longer than the one-page Anglo-American convention, with more detail on education and formal qualifications.

Include your NIE if you already have one. The foreigners' identification number tells a recruiter you have some existing status in Spain, which quietly answers the question they were going to ask anyway. If you do not have one yet, leave it out rather than explaining.

Language levels should be concrete. State the level and the evidence, for example a DELE certificate or a Cambridge grade. Recruiters read "conversational" as unverifiable.

Getting through the screening software

Larger Spanish employers and most recruitment agencies run applications through an applicant tracking system before a person reads them. The system reads your CV as text and matches it against the listing.

Three things trip up foreign applicants specifically. Job titles translate badly, so a title that is standard in your home market may not match what the employer typed. Qualifications need a local reference point, since a recruiter scanning quickly will not know where your degree sits. And formatting that survived a British application, such as multi-column layouts and text inside images, is read as noise or missed entirely.

Our guide on optimising a CV for ATS covers the mechanics. The Spain-specific version of the advice is to mirror the exact wording of the Spanish listing rather than translating your existing CV once and sending it everywhere. Tailoring per application is the single highest-return habit in this market, and it is what CV optimisation automates.

The visa and relocation side

We deliberately do not cover immigration. It changes often, it is consequential to get wrong, and it deserves someone who works on it full time.

For Spain specifically, SpainGuru is the resource we point people to. They cover the routes that matter for job seekers, including the highly qualified professional permit and the digital nomad visa introduced under the 2022 startups law, along with the paperwork around NIE, empadronamiento and social security registration. They have been doing it for years for a large community of people moving to Spain.

Two things are worth knowing before you read further into it. The route that fits you depends on whether you have an offer, so the sequence often runs offer first and paperwork second rather than the other way round. And if you already hold EU citizenship, most of this does not apply to you and your constraint is simply registration.

A realistic sequence

Decide your city or region first, because it changes which boards and which employers matter. Build one strong Spanish CV and treat it as a template rather than a finished document. Register on InfoJobs and set up LinkedIn alerts, then add Tecnoempleo or the relevant specialist board. Identify fifteen to twenty employers who plausibly sponsor and watch their own career pages. Tailor every application to the listing. Sort out the immigration route in parallel rather than waiting until an offer arrives.

Spain rewards persistence and local signalling more than volume. Fifty tailored applications to employers who can hire you will beat five hundred generic ones every time.

Finding a job in Spain as a foreigner

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to speak Spanish to work in Spain?

Can I apply for jobs in Spain before I have a visa?

Should I put a photo on my Spanish CV?

Which job board should I start with?