Advice written during the 2021 and 2022 hiring boom still circulates widely, and it sets expectations the current market does not meet. Tech workers planning a move deserve an accurate read on where sponsorship still happens and where competition has tightened, before building a relocation timeline around an offer arriving quickly.
Still an employer's market in 2026, three years into the post-2022 correction. Scale-ups that hired aggressively during the boom have trimmed, budgets are tighter, and time-to-hire has stretched, so it's not the "any warm body with a GitHub" era anymore. That said, it's not dead: specific skills — security, particular cloud and data roles, senior engineers who need no ramp-up — still get chased hard, and companies will sponsor for them despite the extra cost and paperwork. Junior and generalist international candidates face the roughest competition, especially without Dutch or local work history, because employers can choose from a deep domestic and EU pool first. The constructive move is to stop relying on cold applications through job boards, which are flooded, and lean on networking, meetups and referrals instead — a large share of roles get filled before they're ever posted publicly.