The largest candidate market in the Netherlands does not apply. Most employees say they could easily find a job with another employer, most are satisfied with their work, and few actually move. That silent majority knows its value. It does not read job ads and does not answer them. Our conclusion: it moves only when a concrete, better offer comes to it, with certainty from the first day.
Confidence has become structural
The Netherlands Working Conditions Survey, run by CBS and TNO, asks employees every year whether they could easily find a new job with another employer. In 2014 a modest majority agreed. Since then the share has climbed almost without a break, peaked in 2022 and has stayed close to that record since.
That matters, because the labour market itself cooled after 2022. The confidence of people who already have a job barely followed. This is no passing wave. Dutch employees have learned that they are in demand, and they have not unlearned it.
They are not unhappy either. Most say they are satisfied with their work. Confident and content at the same time: that is the starting position of the average Dutch employee.
Below middle age, nearly everyone knows it
The confidence is highest exactly where employers recruit hardest. Among younger and mid-career employees, the large majority say they could easily move. Only in the oldest age groups does the share drop clearly.
Yet hardly anyone leaves
Against all that confidence stands the actual movement, and it is small. CBS figures on job changes show that only a small share of employees changes employer in any quarter, and among permanent staff the share is smaller still. Whoever gives up a permanent contract rarely gets a new one straight away.
So the gap between could and does is wide. It is not ignorance and not discontent. It is a threshold: a move usually costs the permanent contract, and nobody brings these people a reason to pay that price. They do not look, because they do not need to.
What this does not show
The survey is a sample of employees, and its design changed in places from 2022 onward, so not every year compares exactly with the ones before. The rise we describe is far larger than that break.
More important: the statement measures perceived ease, not a wish to leave. Someone who says they could easily move does not yet want to. These figures show reachability, not intent to leave, and we read them that way. Setting the CBS switching figures next to the survey is our own interpretation. The self-employed fall outside both sources. If confidence fell back sharply while job changes stayed level, the reading in this article would no longer hold.
What you can do
- Judge job ads only on the active market. The silent majority does not see them.
- Approach people directly. The group that could move is large, especially below middle age.
- Make the first contact concrete: the role, the content, the salary. People who know their value drop out of a vague pitch.
- Remove the barrier that confidence does not solve. Offer a permanent contract from the first day.