By Florin Buduroi, Managing Director at Adams Multilingual Recruitment
I usually save reflections like this for the end of the year, but the pace at which our market has been changing this year, made me want to look sooner, while the picture is still forming rather than settled. Here’s what we’ve been seeing in the first half of 2026, recruiting for international companies here in the Netherlands.
The volume of temporary work has decreased considerably
Since January, agency workers have been entitled to employment conditions equivalent in value to those of permanent employees under the new Collective Labour Agreement. The result is that hiring through a recruitment agency now carries a greater administrative burden.
While our direct assignments have increased, the demand for temporary workers has dropped by 53% since January this year.
More candidates are open to moving, though not evenly
Many more people are willing to consider a move than were a year or two ago, and we have seen applications rise as a result, particularly for roles in HR, marketing, and recruitment. The same is not true everywhere. For sales and commercial positions, for finance, and for genuinely multilingual roles, the response remains thin.
Decisions are still being made slowly
The length of the recruitment process has not improved. We treat anything beyond roughly forty days, from advertisement to a signed offer, as a long search, and a fair share of this year’s assignments have passed that point. This continues a pattern now in its third year: more interview rounds, more people involved in the decision, and a general reluctance to commit quickly even when the candidate is clearly the right one.
Six months of extremes
The same six months produced some of our quickest and slowest work. We filled a warehouse coordinator role in five working days and placed a Dutch and Italian speaker within eighteen. At the other end, we completed a commercial leadership search for a global organisation that became the most valuable assignment in our history, and finished a process for an entry-level position that had taken the better part of seven months.
Trust still decides more than anything else
During a slower market, the searches that reach a good outcome are almost always those built on an established relationship. Where we understand a company and its culture well enough to judge whether someone will suit it, and where the client is genuinely committed to hiring, the process tends to move. Recruitment has always worked this way.
Some sectors are hiring differently
While much of the market is cautious, several sectors are still actively recruiting. Food, fast-moving consumer goods, e-commerce and the businesses now built around AI are hiring in volume, paying competitively, and running notably decisive processes. When a company in one of these fields decides to hire, it tends to move quickly, which stands out against the slower pace elsewhere.
Multilingual talent remains genuinely scarce
Demand for multilingual candidates has not eased. Those with real business fluency in German, Italian and French are the hardest of all to find, and the international companies based here continue to compete for the same small group of people. For roles that require more than one working language, the shortage is the defining feature of the search.
25% of our assignments this year asked for Italian, German or French language skills.
There are fewer open roles at entry level
In 2025, 30% of our vacancies were junior positions. So far in 2026, just 8% have been entry-level roles.
Most of the work we have been asked to handle sits at mid-level, in specialist functions, or at senior and middle-management grade. For those beginning their careers the market is harder, as most open vacancies on the market require experience.
Executive search is busy
Executive recruitment, by contrast, has held up well. Companies are putting serious investment into strategic appointments and want a search partner who can study a market properly, approach people who are not actively looking, and identify the few who will genuinely contribute to their growth.
International companies are still arriving in the Netherlands
New offices continue to open and new teams are being built, drawn by the country’s location, its multilingual workforce and its standing as a base for European operations. For all the caution elsewhere, the underlying reasons that bring organisations to the Netherlands have not changed, and we expect that to continue through the second half of the year.
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Six months in, the market is harder to read than it has been in years: slower in some places, remarkably quick in others, and reshaped by rules that have made flexible work more complicated. But underneath all of this, the fundamentals that have always defined recruiting in the Netherlands are still there. The companies making the best hires are those that know exactly what they are looking for before the search begins, and that act decisively when they find the right people.
I will be interested to see how much of it still holds when we come to reflect on this at the end of 2026.
