The Holy Grail in HR: where can we find international IT talent?

Despite a slight decrease, IT is still the job category with the most vacancies in the Netherlands, holding a market share of 11.3% in the third quarter of 2016. According to the CBS (Central Statistics Agency), IT holds 47 vacancies per 1000 jobs of employees.

The Holy Grail in HR

But where do you find the talent to fill all those vacancies? A recurring question amongst several of our clients. A Dutch customer, who uses Jobfeed and Textkernel’s semantic search technology to manage a job portal targeted at international talent looking for jobs in the Netherlands, wanted to find out from which countries people were looking for IT jobs using their portal. We’ve had a look at our data to find out.

We used a dataset from September 2016. First, we checked from which countries people clicked on vacancies in general. The top 5 looked as follows*:

1. United Kingdom
2. USA
3. Italy
4. Germany
5. Canada

* Since we wanted to find out from which countries other than the Netherlands people clicked on IT vacancies, the Netherlands was taken out of these results.

Where to find international IT-talent?

Zooming in on IT vacancies specifically, we see slightly shifting results:

1. United Kingdom
2. Brazil
3. Italy
4. Russia
5. USA

In the top 5 we find countries that score highly for clicks on IT vacancies, but lower for clicks in general. Brazil for example is on 2nd place when it comes to IT vacancies, but holds the 17th place in the overall toplist. Another climber is Russia: it’s number 19 in the overall top list, but holds 4th place in the IT vacancies top list. Besides Russia and Brazil, a relatively high number of clicks on IT vacancies came from Portugal and Israël (number 6 and 8).

This study can help to point tech-employers in the right direction.

Bauke Visser, data consultant at Textkernel, says, “The question: ‘where can we find IT talent?’ is the Holy Grail within HR. This study can help to point tech-employers in the right direction. The good thing about this dataset is that we know it’s about IT-ers, since they clicked on IT vacancies specifically. Besides that, it’s a portal for jobs in the Netherlands, so we presume that they are open to move abroad, i.e. to the Netherlands.”

Want to find out more about Jobfeed, Textkernel’s Big Data tool for the labour market? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.