How to hire top web developers in the Netherlands

The Netherlands has one of the hottest tech scenes in the world. The country has everything a tech business could possibly need — a highly qualified English-speaking workforce, quality tech schools, first-class business facilities, a favorable tax code, strong international travel infrastructure, and an impressive history of innovation. With all these attributes, it’s little wonder the likes of Oracle, Google, and Cisco have all opened their offices in Holland.

So how do you go about finding dedicated software engineers and web developers in a country that is swarming with tech companies desperate to hire developers? We’ve analyzed six different options, including one you may have never heard of — so make sure you read on until the very end!

While job boards aren’t exactly breaking news — you’ve probably already used them at some point — our list would be incomplete without them. As such, we’ve decided to take a look at the Netherlands’ biggest employment websites. These are:

Careerjet
Indeed
MonsterBoard
NationaleVacaturebank
Bonque (aimed exclusively at the IT sector)
DutchStartupJobs

To give you an idea of how active some of these job boards are, and how much competition you’ll have, we conducted a quick search for a few skills. Bear in mind here that the vacancies we found could include jobs that require a certain technology as a desired rather than a must-have skill.

As an alternative to job boards, you could try posting your vacancy on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, this isn’t a service offered for free, and it’s worth noting that LinkedIn’s pricing per job varies depending on the location and job title. We checked how much this platform would charge you if you wanted to hire a web developer in Amsterdam, and the price was €130/job as part of a ten-job package. Furthermore, if you wanted to post an individual job, this price would go up 41%. And remember that if you don’t manage to fill your vacancy within 90 days, it will be taken down automatically.

As a thriving epicenter of technology, the Netherlands is naturally host to quite a lot of tech conferences, events, and workshops. They provide a great opportunity to interact with your peers, forge new connections, and meet great developers for hire. So keep your eyes peeled for tech events near you. Listed below are just a few of the largest conferences that take place in Holland, but there are many more smaller events that occur throughout the year.

The Next Web Conference, known as “the most intimate technology festival on the planet”, brings together international technology executives, top investors, and promising startups for two days of business and knowledge sharing. Since its launch 11 years ago, the conference has grown from a 200-person gathering to one of the leading technology events in the world, attracting over 15,000 attendees. This year’s conference took place in May, and the date for next year’s event is yet to be announced.

Startup Fest Europe is a week-long festival that will take place this September in cities all around the Netherlands. The festival’s events aim to help startups grow faster by bringing together founders, investors, industry leaders, web developers, and engineers around a wide variety of startup-related topics.

Startup Fest may be the largest event for startups, but it’s far from being the only one.

Uprise Festival is a people first, tech second festival that rotates between Dublin and Amsterdam. This one-day event provides a different flavor to larger, more formal tech conferences by organizing a single big, hectic marketplace for startups and corporations, huddle-up panel sessions, walk-in workshops, insane pitch battles, and an overall relaxed atmosphere you’d expect to find in a music festival rather than a tech event. The next conference will take place in Dublin, after which there will be an event in Amsterdam, currently scheduled for April 2018.

European Women in Technology, which will kick off this November, offers two days of career changing insight, giving attendees the chance to connect, learn and act on gender diversity in the tech industry. The event will feature plenty of inspirational talks delivered by industry leaders, and will contribute to the development of women’s technical and soft skills through personal and career development workshops, as well as a range of technical classes.

To stay on top of all the tech events in your area, we recommend Meetup.

Another option you can try is contracting a staffing agency in the Netherlands. This is especially helpful if you don’t have your own recruiters, or if you don’t have enough time to look for developers for hire yourself. You’ll need to provide the agency with a very detailed description of the kind of developers you’re looking for and the kind of projects you have so they can find the closest match for your needs. Before sending you the CVs, the agency will usually conduct preliminary interviews to eliminate unsuitable candidates.

Bear in mind that hiring through a recruitment agency isn’t a guarantee you’ll find the right web developer faster. It can still take up to three or four months. And it’s not free, of course. Generally, agencies charge between 18 and 25 percent of the gross annual income (including fringe benefits) of any employee they helped you hire.

The Netherlands, just like many other countries, is undergoing a major tech talent shortage, so it might happen that the options described above will bring you little to no success. If this is the case, you could try sourcing a developer from a country with a larger tech talent pool.

The process of finding a web developer abroad isn’t much different from what you’d do at home. However, depending on where the developer you want to hire comes from, you may need to get recognized as a sponsor by the IND (Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service). This license currently costs €5,276, and the whole relocation process involves quite a bit of paperwork.

If the above options don’t work out or seem too cumbersome to even attempt, there’s one other way you could try: set up a remote development center abroad.

We are Grid Dynamics – a digital-native technology services provider that accelerates growth and bolsters competitive advantage for Fortune 1000 companies. The company has 15+ years of experience in digital transformation and software innovation, most notably open-source cloud-native programs.  

Our clients have the option of choosing the engagement model which best suits their requirements, including team extension, dedicated teams, pod teams, and remote development centers. Grid Dynamics has offices throughout Eastern Europe and Central Europe and Latin America, meaning that we have the resources to cater to the needs of companies of any size, no matter where they are located.

If you decide to hire software or website developers with us, you simply need to specify your requirements, and our recruiters will get back to you with a selection of candidates that best fit your needs. Once you’ve personally interviewed them and selected the engineers you want to hire, we place them in one of our fully-equipped offices in Ukraine’s largest tech cities — Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro.

You then go on to manage your remote team directly, while we take care of team retention, HR, payroll and taxes, and help you establish an open and effective relationship with your Ukrainian developers.

If you’d rather have your development team in-house, we can assist you with the relocation process. We already have sponsor status in the Netherlands, as well as the “Orange Carpet” treatment at the Dutch embassy, which simplifies and speeds up the relocation process.

Onno Becker Hof,

CTO at Euretos

The experience we’ve had with Grid Dynamics has been very positive, and they’ve been able to deliver the Java development resources we need. The English classes for a team, pizza parties, and corporate events are all part of the Grid Dynamics approach, and I consider these important elements in building a sustainable development team. Grid Dynamics takes care of the team members’ social contributions, pension fund payments, taxes, vacations, sick days, and the like, which means I don’t have to worry and can fully concentrate on the actual development work.

Stepan Suvorov,

VP of Engineering at Studytube

The team we built with Grid Dynamics is made up of reliable JavaScript developers who produce high-quality code. The remote model is definitely working out well for us. Grid Dynamics takes care of everything related to maintaining our team’s office, including setting up workstations and taking care of payroll and taxes. Our HR/Client Manager at Grid Dynamics gives us a lot of support every time we need to find new developers for our team.

If you struggle to find software developers locally, take a look at our detailed guide on hiring tech talent from Ukraine, and feel free to contact us in case you have any questions about our model.