If you're hiring someone from outside the EEA, the single question that shapes everything else is this: is the role on Ireland's Critical Skills Occupations List?
Get the answer right and you may skip a month of mandatory advertising, give the worker immediate family reunification, and put them on a path to long-term residence. Get it wrong and you advertise the wrong salary, take the slower route, and sometimes have to start the application again. This is a short employer check, not an exhaustive list dump — the goal is to tell you which side of the line your role falls on and what that means for you.
The 30-second check
Three questions decide it. Work through them in order.
- Is the occupation on the Critical Skills Occupations List? Not the job title you use internally — the occupation. Ireland's list is built on Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes, so what matters is the occupation code your role maps to, not your wording on the ad.
- What salary are you offering? The Critical Skills route has a salary floor. If your offer clears it, the route is open; if it doesn't, the role drops to the General Employment Permit.
- Does the role need a relevant degree? Most listed occupations do, and that affects which threshold applies.
If the occupation is listed and the pay clears the floor, you're looking at a Critical Skills Employment Permit (CSEP). If not, you're almost certainly on the General Employment Permit (GEP) route — which is still entirely workable, just slower. We cover the full comparison in GEP vs CSEP: which permit does your business need?
What's actually on the list
The Critical Skills Occupations List exists to fill roles Ireland has identified as genuine skills shortages. It is reviewed by the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs and published by the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. Rather than reproduce every SOC code, here are the broad categories an employer is most likely to be hiring within:
- Healthcare: medical practitioners, registered nurses, registered midwives, physiotherapists, radiographers and other allied health professionals.
- ICT and telecoms: software developers, programmers, web developers, and IT project and network managers.
- Engineering: civil, mechanical, electrical and process engineers, including design and automation specialists.
- Science and research: chemical and biological scientists and medical laboratory professionals.
- Business and finance: chartered and certified accountants, architects, and certain management consultants and marketing specialists.
- Management: production managers and directors, and health and social services managers.
The detail that catches employers out: the list works on occupation codes, not titles. A role you'd describe one way internally can map to a listed occupation — and a role with an impressive title can fall outside it. Always check the occupation code, and when in doubt, confirm it before you advertise a salary.
For most of the roles we place — care assistants, chefs, general operatives, farm and meat-processing staff, HGV drivers — the occupation is not on the Critical Skills list, and that's completely normal. Those roles go through the General Employment Permit. The Critical Skills list is the exception for higher-skilled positions, with registered nurses being the one that comes up most often for the employers we work with.
The salary floor that decides it
Even when an occupation is on the list, the salary you offer has to clear a threshold. As set by the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, the current Critical Skills floors are:
| Situation | Minimum annual salary |
|---|---|
| Occupation on the Critical Skills list, requiring a relevant degree | €40,904 |
| Same, where the qualification was obtained in the 12 months before applying | €36,848 |
| Any occupation not on the list (degree route waived if experience is sufficient) | €68,911 |
That last line is worth knowing. If you're making a senior hire at €68,911 or above, you can use the Critical Skills route regardless of whether the occupation is formally listed — and skip the Labour Market Needs Test entirely. These are basic-pay figures: bonuses, overtime and allowances don't count toward the floor, and the thresholds are reviewed periodically, so confirm the current number before you commit to a salary on an advert. For where these sit against the General Employment Permit minimums, see the minimum salary for an overseas worker in Ireland.
What changes if your role is on the list
This is the part that actually matters to you as the employer. A role being on the Critical Skills list changes three things:
No Labour Market Needs Test. Because the skill is recognised as being in short supply, you don't have to advertise the role on the Jobs Ireland platform for 28 days before applying. That alone removes roughly four to six weeks from the front of the process and the administration that comes with it.
Immediate family reunification. A Critical Skills permit holder can bring their spouse or partner and dependants with them straight away. The spouse or partner is normally granted Stamp 1G immigration permission, which lets them take up employment in Ireland without needing a separate work permit of their own. In practice this makes the offer far easier for a strong candidate to accept, and placements where the family travels together tend to be the ones that last.
A path to Stamp 4. Critical Skills permits are issued against a job offer of at least two years. After that period the worker can apply directly to the Department of Justice for Stamp 4 permission, which lets them live and work in Ireland without holding an employment permit at all. You're not locked into a cycle of renewals the way you can be with other routes.
Put together, a listed role is faster to fill, easier to recruit for, and more stable once the worker is in place. That's the whole point of the list.
What if your role isn't on the list?
Most employers we speak to are hiring for roles that aren't on the Critical Skills list — and that's genuinely fine. You take the General Employment Permit route instead. It works for the great majority of permit-eligible occupations: care assistants, chefs, hospitality staff, general operatives, agricultural and meat-processing workers, drivers and more.
The trade-offs to plan for are straightforward. The General Employment Permit requires the 28-day Labour Market Needs Test before you can apply, the salary floor is different (€36,605 for most roles, with a reduced rate of €16.12 an hour — €32,691 a year at 39 hours — for healthcare assistants, home support workers, horticulture and meat-processing operatives), and construction trades are set against the relevant Sectoral Employment Order rates rather than the general minimum. Family reunification is possible but not immediate. Realistically, plan for around six months from first conversation to the worker's first day once you account for advertising, Department of Enterprise processing and the employment visa.
None of that should put you off. It simply means the route is a little longer and the paperwork sits in a different order. The mistake to avoid is assuming a role is on the Critical Skills list when it isn't, advertising the wrong salary, and having to backtrack. If you're new to the system, our full guide to hiring non-EU workers in Ireland walks through both routes end to end.
Where CA Recruitment fits in
Working out which list a role sits on, mapping it to the right occupation code, and pitching the salary at the correct floor is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to get wrong on your own — and expensive to get wrong, because it can cost you weeks. We do this every week.
We place workers from the Philippines with Irish employers and manage the full Department of Enterprise permit process on your behalf — Critical Skills or General Employment Permit, whichever applies. The first thing we do on a free consultation is confirm the route, because that one decision shapes the salary you advertise, your timeline, and whether you need a Labour Market Needs Test at all. You don't touch the lists yourself.
Not sure which list your role is on?
Free consultation. We confirm the permit route before you commit to anything.