Understanding the Dutch job market, and the expectations of the person across the table, is key to getting hired as an international in the Netherlands.

Most internationals show up with a CV that served them perfectly well at home, and that's exactly the problem. A Dutch recruiter is scanning for different signals, in a different length, in a different tone, and none of that has anything to do with how good you actually are at your job.

Start with length. If you were taught a CV must fit one page, let that go. Two pages is standard here, and cramming a decade of work into one page reads as thin, not sharp.

Then tone it down, literally. Dutch business writing is understated, almost blunt. Calling yourself a results-driven visionary won't read as confident, it'll read as noise a busy recruiter skims straight past. Say what you did, what changed because of it, and let the numbers do the persuading.

The line most people forget is the one that quietly kills the most applications: work authorization. A recruiter looking at a foreign name and a foreign address won't spend a call finding out whether hiring you means a permit process, they'll just move on. If you qualify for the highly skilled migrant scheme, say so near the top. It's often the difference between a callback and silence.

None of this is about pretending to be someone you're not. It's about being read correctly by someone with 30 seconds and a stack of a hundred CVs. For a longer walkthrough of formatting conventions, The Hague International Centre's guide is a solid start, though the version tailored to your actual story is the one that gets you hired.

When nothing comes back, the instinct is to send more. It almost never works, because volume was never the constraint.

A vacancy exists because something is broken: a team is behind, someone left, a market needs opening. The requirements list is just a rough attempt to describe who could fix that. Read it a second time and ask what breaks if the role stays empty for six months, then build your application around being the answer, not around ticking bullet points.

Your first reader has about 30 seconds and often isn't an expert in your field. They're matching your CV against a vacancy, not evaluating your career, so anything that requires guessing what you mean is a risk you can't afford. Lead with what you changed, not what you were responsible for.

Here's the part most people miss entirely: the channel matters more than another rewrite. A cold application through a job portal is competing with hundreds of near-identical submissions. The same application sent through a referral, or through a recruiter who works your niche, is a completely different conversation, and it's not a coincidence that referrals consistently outperform job board applications. Specialist recruiters for internationals, like Undutchables, exist for exactly this reason.

And if a company runs your CV through software before a human ever sees it, you're not imagining that either. Applicant tracking systems are standard practice, which is one more reason a generic CV sent to 200 postings underperforms 20 CVs built for 20 specific roles.

Silence isn't a verdict on you. It's usually a matching failure, and matching failures are fixable.