.png){kind=spacer}
The Dutch startup ecosystem is the most significant growth engine in the country and it shows an incredible resilience to the crisis.
Dutch startups are the #1 job growth engine in the Netherlands according to research from Techleap, Dealroom, CBRE reported in October 2020. Dutch startups account for 109k jobs, 25k of which were created in the last three years. This comes down to more than 8k jobs per year. The growth of startup jobs has shown an average of +8% annual growth.
According to this year's Startup Genome Report over 60% of startups have laid off employees or reduced salaries. An average of 33% of jobs were cut at startups. But even though some startups had to let people go, the growth of startup jobs show an incredible resilience to the current global pandemic. During this pandemic startup job growth stayed strong with a +4% increase, higher than any other sector. This is a trend that shows some historical consistency. In and around the period of the great recession (2008 - 2011) jobs in the “Computer Systems Design and Related Services” category was growing by 2.6% per year, while job creation in the overall economy was negative, at -1.2%.
Not only the statistics show that startup jobs keep on growing. We have listed some real life examples in our blogs like the 10 cool scaleups in the Netherlands to work for. But interestingly, the majority of the jobs do not come from these emerging giants, but rather from companies under 5 years old (57%). That’s why we also gave some examples of 10 young and fast growing Dutch startups that are hiring growth talent.
The majority (57%) of jobs come from companies under 5 years old
From a career perspective, startups are a very interesting place to be. When you join a fast growing company, chances are that your career grows together with that company. The company has an increasing impact on the world, therefore there are more things to do in the company and you get more responsibilities. This creates a compounding effect because the more you are pulled out of your comfort zone the more you learn. Next to this, startup jobs are a future-proof career choice because digital services are ever increasing, which means that your digital savviness will be more in-demand in the future.
The Netherlands is an interesting place to find talent scoring relatively high on talent (7/10) according to the earlier referred Genome report. This means there’s good access to talent (the percentage of engineers and growth employees with at least 2 years of startup experience), the quality of talent is relatively high and talent is affordable. Next to talent, the Netherlands is also one of the best connected countries in terms of local connectedness of ecosystem players and availability of accelerators, incubators and grants (scoring 10/10).
All together, weather you are a hiring startup or talent looking to have a fulfilling career, the Netherlands is a good place to be.
We thank you for reading, and we thank @Techleap @Dealroom @CBRE @StartupGenome for the key insights included in this blog.
Search billions of profiles through dozens of platforms.
