The Dutch IT labour market has cooled, and hiring has not become much easier. Both are true. Vacancies have fallen since 2023 and more IT professionals claim unemployment benefit, yet employment in IT occupations keeps growing faster than in any other occupational group, and most companies that recruit IT staff still end up with vacancies they cannot fill. Our conclusion from the CBS, UWV, ING and Eurostat figures: the shortage did not disappear, it changed shape. The question now is whether the right people apply.
Signals that seem to clash
Falling vacancies and rising unemployment suggest a looser market. Record employment growth suggests the opposite. The signals fit once you accept that demand has not gone away. What has gone is the speed of 2021 and 2022, when IT employment grew sharply and any reasonable offer found takers. Growth stalled at the end of 2022, dipped, and recovered later in 2025.
UWV links the rise in unemployment to reorganisations at large IT employers, banks among them, often tied to investment in AI, to a wave of bankruptcies, and to productivity gains. The composition shifted too. Where claimants used to be mostly older workers, more of them are now mid-career.
Looser without being easier
The share of recruiting firms left with hard-to-fill IT vacancies has come down somewhat, but far less than the drop in vacancies would suggest. Dutch employers name too few applications and missing IT skills more often than the European average. They name salary expectations less often. The problem is rarely that the candidate costs too much. It is that the right candidate does not apply, or applies without the skills asked for.
The market is also split. Demand holds up for experienced specialists in cloud, security, data and AI, while entry-level roles come under pressure from automation. With IT enrolment falling as well, firms that only hire senior people today risk a missing layer of experienced staff in a few years.
And most IT professionals do not work at IT companies. A large majority work in business services, government, industry and retail. An employer that only benchmarks against software firms sees a small part of the competition.
What this does not show
CBS and UWV use different definitions and dates, so their totals differ. Benefit claims show who is out of work, not who fits your role. The split between specialist and entry-level demand comes from sector analysis by ING, not from a single official series. Our reading would change if hard-to-fill rates fell as fast as vacancies, which so far they have not.
What you can do
- Stop waiting for applications. The most cited reason a role stays open is that the right people do not respond to adverts. Approach them.
- Look at mid-career professionals coming out of reorganisations, particularly at large financial and corporate IT departments.
- Benchmark against every employer of IT staff in your region, not only software companies.
- Lead with the work and the skills you will build, not only with salary. Money is less often the brake than fit.
- Keep hiring some juniors. A team that only buys experience now will struggle to find it later.
More on this field: software engineering and data and AI.