July 17, 2026
The local market cannot supply many of the senior profiles portfolios now depend on. This is a data-led view of when to look abroad, what it costs, and what it means for both the company and the candidate.
Start with the market a Dutch portfolio company is actually hiring into. At the start of 2026 the Netherlands still had on the order of 400,000 open vacancies, and in technology the imbalance remains severe: CBS figures recorded nearly 23,000 ICT vacancies against 553,000 people working in ICT occupations, with the segment rated among the tightest in the economy. Government-commissioned research had projected a shortfall of roughly 58,300 ICT professionals and 210,900 in engineering for 2026, a target year that has now arrived with the gap still open. For most positions this is a recruitment problem. For the senior, specialist roles that carry a value creation plan, it is closer to a structural one, and it is the reason a growing share of searches now end abroad.
The picture is easy to misread, so it is worth being precise. On aggregate, the Dutch labour market has loosened. By the end of 2025 there were about 97 vacancies for every 100 unemployed people, the first time job-seekers had outnumbered open positions since 2021, down from a peak of 142 in spring 2022 though still well above the pre-pandemic norm of around 32. That cooling is real, but it is a blended figure, and it does not reach the parts of the market a portfolio company depends on.
Beneath the average, the specialist segment remains acute. Two in five Dutch IT firms still say a shortage of people is constraining their growth, and the government's own target of a million IT workers by 2030 is an admission of how wide the gap is. The roles that decide whether a thesis is delivered, a technology leader who has scaled a platform, a finance director who has run a sale process, a commercial lead who has opened new markets, sit in the tightest part of an already tight market. This is the gap an international search is being asked to close.
Two forces push the search across the border. The first is that the domestic supply of these profiles is thin and, on current evidence, narrowing. Knowledge migration into the Netherlands, long a release valve for skilled shortages, has fallen sharply: around 16,000 highly skilled migrants from outside the EU arrived in 2024, down 26 percent on the year before and 39 percent below 2022, and net migration eased again through 2025. The supply line that many hiring plans quietly assumed is thinner than it was.
The second force is time. A founder-led business can afford to wait for the ideal local candidate. A company working to a three to five year hold cannot leave a pivotal role open while that person becomes available. When the profile does not exist locally in sufficient number and the investment clock is running, the search widens naturally to Germany, the Nordics, the United Kingdom and beyond. The international hire is not a preference. It is what scarcity and the hold period produce together.
The harder question is not whether to look abroad but when. International search is not a default to reach for the moment a local shortlist looks thin, and treating it that way is how companies take on landing risk they did not need. It earns its place in three situations. The first is when the role is genuinely profile-specific and the domestic pool has been tested and exhausted rather than simply found inconvenient. The second is when the plan depends on experience that has not been run at scale in the Netherlands, such as integrating a buy-and-build across borders or building a go-to-market engine in several countries at once. The third is timing: because an international hire takes longer to land, the decision has to be made early enough in the hold that a longer ramp still leaves usable runway. There is also a precondition that is often skipped. A company should only open an international search if it can support one, with recognised sponsor status, a real relocation budget and the means to help a family settle. Without that, the search is better kept local.
The evidence is more sobering than the enthusiasm around global talent suggests. In practice, a well-run cross-border mandate typically takes twelve to sixteen weeks, longer than a comparable domestic search, because it has to assess both the candidate and the landing risk, and the pool of genuinely multi-country senior leaders is narrower than national markets combined would imply, since those people tend to cluster inside a small number of company groups. The failure rate is not trivial either: studies of international assignments place it broadly between 10 and 40 percent, and the cause cited most often is not the executive's performance but the family's inability to settle.
The direction of travel, though, is unmistakable, and it is driven by necessity rather than fashion. Robert Half’s 2025 research found that 87 percent of technology leaders reported difficulty finding skilled candidates and 76 percent had identified skills gaps within their teams, with widening searches to international or remote talent pools a consistent response across that period. When the local market offers a fraction of the specialists a plan requires, looking abroad stops being optional.
For the company and the candidate alike, this is a genuine trade-off rather than an obvious win, and the offer that lands is the one where both sides have been weighed honestly. The main points sit on each side as follows.
For the portfolio company, the benefits are clear: access to a far larger talent pool, proven operating experience at the required scale, speed to a capability the local market cannot match, and a broader perspective in the leadership team. The considerations are just as real: a longer and more expensive search and onboarding, integration and landing risk, rising sponsorship and compliance obligations, and a less competitive net package after recent tax changes.
For the candidate, the appeal is a larger or more senior role than the home market offers, meaningful equity in a PE-backed business, and international experience that compounds over a career. Set against that are a reduced tax advantage and higher living costs, relocation factors such as residency, schooling and a partner's career, and the real personal risk if the move does not settle.
Two recent changes sharpen the candidate's side of that table in particular. The expat tax scheme has been capped and falls from 30 to 27 percent in 2027, while the partial non-resident status that sheltered foreign income ended at the start of 2025, so the net value of a Dutch offer is lower than it recently was. Since January 2026, sponsors also face a higher salary threshold, near 5,942 euros a month for applicants over 30, and a new obligation to prove that salary has actually been paid. None of this closes the door. It does mean the offer on the spreadsheet and the offer a candidate actually experiences have drifted apart, and a company that models the old position will keep losing people at the final stage.
The companies that hire well across borders behave consistently. They pressure-test the brief before widening the search, and are honest about whether the role needs an international profile or whether the specification has simply been drawn too tightly. They model the package net of the current tax and immigration position rather than last year's, so the offer holds up when the candidate runs the real numbers. They build landing support into the hire, treating the partner and family with the same seriousness as the executive, because that is where most failures are decided. And rather than settling for a compromise appointment when the right person is abroad, they make the international decision deliberately, with the full cost and the full risk visible from the outset.
The point is not that international hiring solves the Dutch talent shortage, nor that companies should avoid the friction and stay local. It is that the two have to be held together. The local market cannot supply many of the senior, specialist profiles that portfolio value creation now depends on, and the international route that fills the gap has become slower, costlier and more tightly regulated at the same moment companies are leaning on it more. That combination rewards intent and punishes improvisation. The portfolio companies that treat cross-border hiring as a deliberate capability, started at the right time, priced honestly and supported through landing, will keep reaching the people their plans require. Those that reach for it casually, late, and on last year's assumptions will keep paying for the same hire twice.
