A small business owner has spent three months covering an empty operations role. Customer calls interrupt the morning. Quotes wait until evening. Existing staff are taking on work that was never meant to be theirs. Hiring feels necessary, but the order book looks less certain than it did in January.
The latest CBS labour-market figures capture that tension. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, the Netherlands had 375,000 open vacancies, 3,000 fewer than one quarter earlier. The number of jobs also fell by 8,000. Yet unemployment declined to 396,000 people, leaving 95 vacancies for every 100 unemployed people.
The market has cooled considerably since the peak of 142 vacancies per 100 unemployed people in 2022. It has not turned into an easy market for employers.
Cooling is not the same as abundance
A national vacancy figure says little about whether a particular business can find a qualified technician, experienced care worker or reliable site supervisor within travelling distance. UWV classified 87 of 93 occupational groups as tight or very tight in the first quarter of 2026. Technical work and health and welfare remained among the areas with serious shortages.
This is why I would resist two tempting conclusions. The first is that recruitment has suddenly become easy. The second is that every vacancy should remain open until business confidence improves.
Both ignore the actual role.
CBS counted 70,500 vacancies in trade, 68,500 in health care and 61,200 in business services. Construction still had the highest vacancy rate, with 73 vacancies per 1,000 employee jobs. An employer looking for skilled construction staff is dealing with a different labour market from one seeking a more widely available administrative profile.
The useful question is not whether the Dutch labour market is tight. It is where the business itself is tight. Is work being lost because nobody can perform it? Are customers waiting? Is the owner filling a real role, or compensating for poor planning and too many low-margin clients?
A salary needs more than a busy month
A permanent hire changes more than headcount. It adds wages, holiday pay, pension costs where applicable, payroll administration, sickness exposure, onboarding and management time. The role must also remain productive when demand weakens.
That matters because employers entered the second quarter cautiously. CBS measured business confidence at minus 14.8 at the start of the quarter, its lowest point since late 2022. More than 30 percent of businesses still identified labour shortages as a constraint, while reported profitability had worsened overall.
I read this as a call for selective hiring, not a general hiring freeze. A business can face genuine staff scarcity and still lack the margin for an additional contract. Conversely, leaving a critical vacancy open can create overtime, delayed delivery, slower invoicing and staff departures. That cost rarely appears neatly in the payroll forecast.
The owner covering the operations role should therefore calculate both sides. What revenue is being delayed or lost? How much management time disappears into routine coordination? Can recurring, adequately priced work support the full employment cost through a quieter quarter? If the answer depends on one large customer renewing, the decision deserves more caution.
The flexible route is less automatic
Small employers often respond to uncertainty with agency workers or self-employed professionals. The latest figures make that route worth examining more closely. Jobs at temporary employment agencies fell by 13,000 in the second quarter, the largest sectoral decline reported by CBS. The number of people whose main job was self-employment also fell by 13,000, entirely among zzp’ers.
CBS has now recorded six consecutive quarterly declines in the number of zzp’ers. There were 131,000 fewer than in the fourth quarter of 2024. This does not mean external expertise has disappeared. It does mean that flexible capacity should not be treated as an unlimited waiting room beside permanent employment.
Contract form also needs to match daily reality. Normal enforcement of employment relationships resumed from 1 January 2025. If a supposed zzp assignment operates as employment, payroll tax, employment-law and pension consequences may follow. The practical discipline is simple: the agreement, supervision, working pattern, commercial independence and actual conduct should tell the same story.
Flexibility remains useful when there is a genuine external assignment. It is less convincing when a contractor fills a permanent place in the roster, works under ordinary managerial control and carries little commercial independence.
Look inside the existing team first
One figure deserves more attention from smaller employers. CBS counted 568,000 part-time workers who wanted more hours and were directly available for them in the second quarter. That is not a ready-made answer to every vacancy. Skills, schedules, location and personal circumstances still matter.
Yet an employer searching outside the company should at least understand the capacity already inside it. A trusted part-time employee may want another shift, a broader role or training that unlocks more useful hours. That conversation can be faster and less risky than recruiting someone unknown. It may also improve retention.
For our overworked owner, the answer might still be a new employee. It could also be extra hours for two existing staff members, better pricing for demanding clients, or a temporary specialist assigned to a defined project. The right choice depends on whether the pressure is recurring and profitable.
The Dutch labour market is no longer as frantic as it was in 2022. That is welcome. But calmer headlines do not remove scarcity, and scarcity does not excuse a weak hiring case. A sound decision starts with the work, the margin and the people already carrying the strain. Only then should another salary enter the room.
Let’s review the cash, workload and contract behind your next hiring decision
The data, sourcing, and analysis behind this article were conducted by Paolo Maria Pavan. AI was not used to identify sources, build the factual basis, or produce the analytical judgment contained here. AI was used only as a drafting aid. The final English text was personally reviewed, edited, and approved by Paolo Maria Pavan before publication.
References
- Werkloosheid gedaald in tweede kwartaal 2026 | CBS
- UWV - Occupational mismatch behind the national figures
- CBS - Employer caution, demand uncertainty and staffing intentions
- Rijksoverheid - Employment-status risk in zzp arrangements
- UWV - Sector and regional divergence in the next hiring cycle
- UWV - Recent unemployment-benefit movements by sector
- Belastingdienst
- Rijksoverheid
