Talent Shortages in Malta: Which Roles Are Hardest to Fill?

Ask any talent acquisition lead working in Malta's iGaming sector which roles keep them up at night, and you will get broadly the same list. Compliance. AML. Senior CRM. VIP management at director level. These are the positions where the search runs long, the candidate pipeline is thin, and the competition is most aggressive.

Understanding why these roles are so hard to fill, not just that they are, is useful for building hiring strategies that can actually work.

Compliance: A Finite Population of Qualified People

The compliance function in iGaming has expanded rapidly in scope and seniority. Compliance Managers and Heads of Compliance who understand the MGA framework in depth, can navigate cross-border licensing requirements, and have the credibility to manage regulatory relationships are genuinely scarce. Not scarce in a relative sense, scarce in an absolute one.

The pool of individuals in Malta who tick all those boxes and are open to a new role at any given moment is small. When they do move, they often receive multiple approaches within days. The operators who engage them first, with a credible brief and a clear process, are the operators who convert.

What makes this function particularly challenging is that compliance professionals are also among the most selective about where they work. Regulatory credibility matters to them personally, they are accountable for it. An operator with a complicated enforcement history will find its shortlist considerably shortened before the search even begins.

AML and MLRO: Regulatory Approval as a Supply Constraint

The MLRO role carries a layer of complexity that most other positions do not: the approved-person process. Regulators assess the fitness and properness of individuals appointed to this function, which means operators cannot hire speculatively or at speed. The candidate needs to be the right person, and that right person needs to clear regulatory scrutiny.

In practice, this means the population of people who are immediately deployable in an MLRO capacity, who have the experience, the clean record, and the prior approval history, is very small indeed. When one of them enters the market, the demand is immediate and intense.

Senior CRM: A Role That Has Outgrown Its Pipeline

CRM has become a strategically significant function, but the talent pipeline into senior CRM roles was built for a simpler version of the job. The combination of data literacy, lifecycle strategy, commercial ownership, and regulatory awareness that a modern Head of CRM needs is not common. There are plenty of CRM Managers. There are far fewer who can walk into a leadership role and immediately operate at the level an established operator requires.

VIP and the Relationship Problem

VIP management is different from most other hard-to-fill categories. The difficulty is not primarily one of skills, it is one of relationships and institutional knowledge. Senior VIP Managers who have built long-term portfolios of high-value players have something that cannot be quickly replicated: trust, established connection, and operational history with clients who value continuity above almost everything else.

When a strong VIP professional leaves, the replacement process is measured in months. The commercial cost is real and often underestimated until it happens.

What This Means Practically

For operators trying to hire in these categories, the lesson is consistent: the standard reactive approach, open a role when the need is acute, run a standard process, hope for good applicants, will not produce the results you need. The talent is there. It is not sitting in a queue waiting for your job ad.

Building relationships before roles open, maintaining visibility in professional communities, and having the process in place to move quickly when the right person is available, that is what differentiates operators who consistently fill these roles well from those who consistently struggle.