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When Dutch employers were asked in autumn 2025 to name their hardest vacancy, 27% named a technical occupation: fitters, welders, CNC operators, machinists, and engineers. Care and welfare professions followed at 13%. In construction, 71% of vacancies arising over the past 12 months were hard to fill; in manufacturing, 53%. The vacancy rate in the fourth quarter of 2025 stood at 7.0% in construction, 5.0% in professional and technical services, and 4.8% in ICT, against 3.9% for the economy as a whole. The overall market is loosening, the share of hard-to-fill vacancies fell from 53% in 2023 to 45% in 2025, but that is largely an office-job story. In Germany, the ICT vacancy rate dropped to 2.5%. The Dutch technical shortage is not a European inevitability. It is a Dutch profile.
Of Dutch employers with external vacancies, 65% made extra recruitment efforts in autumn 2025 because of labour market tightness. The order forms a ladder. At the top sit the cheap rungs: spreading vacancies across more channels (54%), recruiting through the employer's own network (52%), and hiring candidates who still need training (52%). Better terms of employment follow at 34%. Only then comes the outside door: 22% hired more temporary, seconded, or freelance staff, and 21% deployed a recruiter, recruitment agency, or headhunter more often. In manufacturing, both external routes sit above average. At the peak of the shortage, in autumn 2021, half of employers with hard-to-fill vacancies engaged a temp agency, recruitment agency, or headhunter. An agency that wins a mandate therefore receives, on average, a vacancy the market has already rejected: 87% of employers with recruitment problems reported too few applications.
Every quarter the European Commission asks firms what limits their production. In July 2026 three of the four constraints in industry fell: insufficient demand to 33.9%, the lowest since July 2023, material shortages to 12.6% and financial constraints to 5.2%. Only the shortage of labour rose, by 0.6 points to 17.1%. In construction, 28.5% of firms called the labour shortage a constraint in December 2025, nearly as many as the 31.0% naming insufficient demand. The economy is picking up, and the first thing that pinches then is staff.
