Multilingual recruitment: why

(Bijgaande tekst is een vrije bewerking van een eerdere post van mij op Recruitingblogs.com. Aangezien ik hiermee alleen van mezelf jat neem ik aan dat het ok is :) Het geeft een goede eerste indruk van wat ik doe en welke markt ik bedien)

Holland is home to many European or EMEA headquarters of some major international companies (Philips, Shell and Unilever not surprisingly, but also for example Cisco or Nike). Some of the reasons are: people tend to speak their languages, infrastructure is highly developed, Holland is in the center of Europe and it has always been a major transportation and logistics hub.

Hence, many companies, especially in and around Amsterdam, have a multinational and multilingual staff with English being the company language. Jobs most common within these organizations are mid-level, in IT (support and software development), Finance (debt/credit control, accounts payable etc.) and Customer Service (many many call centers servicing the European region).

Every year, about 10.000 people from the European Union alone move to The Netherlands for employment. Some major call centers in Amsterdam provide work for 500-1500 non-Dutch speakers each. Ok for some of you this might not be big numbers, but remember Holland is a very small country with just 16 million inhabitants, so it's a relatively interesting niche market.

What makes it even more interesting, is the fact that the majority of job seekers is relatively easy going and open to a variety of different job offers, which makes it fun to work with them. And since you can recruit throughout Europe, the pond holds a lot more fish. Furthermore, the number 1 channel through which people search for a job in Holland is the internet, which makes it relatively easy to decide in which channel to invest to reach those candidates. Modern media offer the right tools to bridge the geographical gap, i.e. through online video interviewing.