From International Hiring to International Employee Success

International candidates bring a lot of value to the table, but do not always present their experience in ways that are immediately recognizable to Dutch employers.

Education systems, diplomas, job titles, sector structures, and career paths vary between countries. Even the typical CV expectations for formatting, presentation, and included information can differ immensely.

A qualification that is well known in one country may be uncommon in the Netherlands and difficult for a Dutch employer to interpret or compare. Similarly, a familiar-sounding job title may involve completely different responsibilities abroad.

Familiarity can easily become an unintentional selection criterion. Employers may favor qualifications, employers, or career paths they recognize, even when these factors are not essential to performance.

A more effective approach is to examine the underlying evidence of capability and potential:

• Which responsibilities and tasks did the candidate handle?
• What level of complexity did they manage?
• Which problems did they solve, and how?
• Which customers or markets did they support?Which skills and knowledge could they transfer to the new role?
• How have they adapted to unfamiliar situations before?
• What is their capacity and motivation to develop (especially in this role and company)?
  
  

This distinction is particularly important when recruiting multilingual and international employees who have other cultural and market backgrounds. Employers can miss strong candidates when they focus too narrowly on recognizable qualifications or experience in an identical position rather than looking at the bigger picture and identifying the strengths that an international hire brings to the table.

Language fluency is one of the most obvious benefits of hiring multilingual talent, but it is certainly not the only one.

Multilingual employees can help companies communicate more naturally with customers, suppliers, and colleagues in other countries. They also typically bring knowledge of a particular customer group, market, regulatory environment, or business culture and recognize nuances in communication that are difficult to learn from market reports alone. They understand how trust is built, how decisions are made, or how products and services are perceived in another region.

International experience can also contribute to broader organizational capabilities. Professionals who have taken the steps to relocate and have worked across countries or languages have developed many specific skills that can be beneficial in a business setting. For example, the ability to observe, learn and adapt, create structure from chaos, work flexibly, shift easily between languages and different frames of reference, and many more.

However, employers should also be careful not to treat international experience as a fixed set of characteristics. National background does not predict an individual’s personality, communication preferences, or working style. Each person and their experiences is unique.

Culture can provide context, but it should not replace curiosity.

Rather than assuming what someone’s background means, ask how it has influenced their work. Which environments have they learned to operate in? Which differences have they had to interpret? What have they learned about collaboration, customers, or problem-solving?

These questions produce a more accurate understanding of what the individual can contribute.

Onboarding is often treated as the transfer of information: the employee receives a laptop, learns the systems, meets the team, and begins performing tasks.

From an organizational perspective, onboarding is also a process of socialization. New employees are learning what the organization values, how people relate to one another, which behaviors are rewarded, and how work is accomplished in practice.

Just as with onboarding, future plans and growth opportunities in a company may be interpreted differently by employees with varying backgrounds. Retention is greatly influenced by whether employees can see a future within the organization, so ensuring that both sides understand each other is essential for laying a long-term foundation of collaboration.

Cultural assumptions come into play in career conversations, often without the knowledge of either the employee or employer. Some employees have learned to state their ambitions directly and regularly, while others believe that strong performance should be recognized without the need for self-promotion.

With all these differences, managers may also interpret these behaviors incorrectly. For example, a person who does not ask for promotion may be seen as lacking ambition, while a person who discusses advancement early may be perceived as impatient.

Organizations can reduce this ambiguity by explaining how development works.

Employees should understand:

• How performance is evaluated
• How feedback is normally provided
• How they can discuss their ambitions
• Which development opportunities are available
• How internal vacancies are communicated
• What is required to move into a more senior role
  
  Clear systems create greater fairness because employees do not need to rely as heavily on their own cultural assumptions or knowledge of unwritten company culture rules.

Psychological safety refers to whether people feel able to speak, ask questions, admit uncertainty, and raise concerns without fearing that doing so will damage their standing in the group.

International employees may need to ask more questions or take longer to adjust to certain ways of working than colleagues who already understand the local and organizational context. They may also be more aware of, or even nervous about, how their language, accent, professional background, or behavior is perceived.

This makes psychological safety especially relevant.

An organization can invite different perspectives while unintentionally discouraging employees from expressing them. For example, teams may say they value diversity but repeatedly reward the communication style that is already dominant, meaning that employees who need more time to formulate an answer in another language or respond differently to a question may be unintentionally passed over and not have their voice heard.

Managers can reduce these barriers by varying how they invite participation. They can share questions before meetings, leave space after asking for input, provide opportunities to contribute in writing, and actively follow up with employees whose perspectives may not emerge as much in a fast group discussion.

One-on-one conversations are also important. Instead of asking only whether everything is going well, managers can ask:

• Is there anything you find difficult to discuss in the team?
• Are you able to contribute in the way you would like?
• Are there expectations you are still trying to understand?
• Do you feel your knowledge and experience are being used?
• What could make collaboration easier?
  
  

These questions help move inclusion from intention to daily behavior.

International employees are often expected to adapt to the organization and the new culture they are a part of. Some adaptation is necessary whenever someone joins a new workplace, but integration should not be entirely one-sided. Organizations also need to remain curious and open to change.

A new employee may notice that a process is based on a local assumption, that customer communication does not work equally well in every market, or that an internal practice creates unnecessary barriers. These observations can be valuable, particularly because established employees may no longer notice the assumptions built into familiar systems.

Diversity in a team creates potential value. Inclusion determines whether that value can truly be expressed and utilized.

This requires more than appreciating visible differences. It means taking unfamiliar questions seriously, examining established practices, and remaining open to the possibility that the organization can learn from the newcomer.

Curiosity is central to this process. Questions such as “How was this handled in your previous environment?” or “What are we missing from your perspective?” communicate that adaptation and learning can happen in both directions.

The international employee experience does not stop at the office door.

An employee may be learning a new role while also arranging housing, municipal registration, insurance, transportation, childcare, schooling, language lessons, and social connections in a completely new language, culture, and system. Their partner or family may also be working hard to adjust to the new and different environment.

These factors can influence the employee’s ability to settle in and eventually their choice to stay.

Research on employee embeddedness emphasizes the importance of fit and connections both within the organization and in the wider community. For international employees, these practical considerations outside of the office are particularly influential. A person may enjoy the role but still leave if housing remains unstable, their family cannot settle, or they lack meaningful connections outside work.

Employers do not need to take responsibility for every part of an employee’s private life of course. However, when the employer acknowledges the importance of the practical and social circumstances outside work and offers support where possible it improves retention and the employee experience, including their opinion of and loyalty to the company.

Support may include:

• Providing clear and realistic information about topics such as relocation, housing, schooling, etc. and guiding new employees to helpful resources and partners for these particular services.
• Allowing for work flexibility while employees attend essential appointments (i.e. visa or housing arrangements, school tours for their children, etc.)
• Offering access to language learning courses
• Hosting your own social integration activities and/or introducing employees into local professional and social networks
• Sharing information or hosting sessions that support accompanying partners or families
• Having honest conversations about what the company can and cannot arrange, while also brainstorming to help employees access the support they need

Many organizations recognize the value of international talent, but good intentions do not automatically create a successful employee experience.

A sustainable approach requires organizations to examine the complete journey, from attraction and selection to onboarding, development, belonging, and retention.

It also requires coordination. Recruitment, HR, management, and leadership each influence different parts of the experience. Alignment on both the values and the process are important to make sure that the intentions of the strategy are not lost or watered-down in the application.

Many of the most important lessons in international hiring come down to curiosity. This means asking questions about internal culture and expectations as well as allowing employees to share their perspectives and improvements that they see.

These questions help companies develop repeatable solutions while also taking a personal approach and understanding each employee’s background and perspective. Turning international hiring into a strong hiring strategy, rather than just a good idea, will make hiring diverse talent more successful for both the employee and the business.

Curiosity may sound like a personal quality, but it can also be designed into organizational practices.

It appears in how interviewers explore unfamiliar experience, how managers respond to questions, how teams discuss differences, and how organizations evaluate their own assumptions.

Remaining curious does not mean avoiding clarity. International employees need clear roles, expectations, standards, and feedback. Curiosity improves that clarity by encouraging employers to check whether the message has been understood as intended.International and multilingual professionals can contribute language ability, knowledge, skills, connections, and different ways of seeing familiar challenges. Organizations benefit most when they create the conditions in which these employees feel comfortable and values so their contributions can be recognized and used to the fullest.

The result is not simply a better experience for international employees. It is an organization that grabs onto the future and enables more business growth opportunities by creating a strong team and being reflective, adaptable, and capable of working effectively across differences.