For nearly two decades I built and led product and technology organisations, which means I spent nearly two decades hiring: reading the CVs, running the interviews, making the offers, and living with the results. Companies work with me on two things: finding senior international talent, and getting their international teams genuinely working with AI.
TechExpats · Amsterdam
Not because the talent is not here. Because five things about hiring across Europe, and in the Netherlands in particular, work against you quietly and at the same time.
Salary bands, notice periods, visa routes, and what a strong CV even looks like change at every border. A search that works in Amsterdam does not transfer unchanged to Munich or Warsaw, and someone who has only worked one market will price and pitch the role wrong in the others.
Senior international professionals are employed, not applying. Many are invisible to Dutch-language sourcing and to the local boards, and none of them answer a templated approach. Reaching them is a conversation someone has to be able to hold, not a search string.
An Israeli technology unit, an Indian institution, a Polish job title: each carries real signal, and someone who has never worked with them reads it as noise. Strong candidates get screened out for being unfamiliar rather than unsuitable. In my experience this is the most common way a European search quietly fails, and the employer never finds out it happened.
A Dutch hiring process is obliged to treat every candidate identically, so an exception in favour of one person does not really exist. I have watched a senior manager want someone who had already been rejected at an early stage, and there was nothing to be done. Rejected once, that person is closed to you, and most employers never learn which ones they lost.
One to three month notice periods, the 30% ruling, a relocation, a partner's job, a school year. A European hire has more places to stall than a local one, and a process that drifts does not lose the candidate to a better offer. It loses them to the company that moved faster.
Dutch and European employers hiring senior international technology talent, and companies whose roles cannot be advertised at all.
The seats that do not close through normal channels: rare profiles, and international candidates that local recruiters cannot reach, read, or assess properly. Sometimes the constraint is not the profile but the publicity, and the search has to run without a trace of it in public.
Search, done by one person. A small number at a time, each one given real attention. Not a volume agency and not a CV forwarding service.
You meet one to three people, not thirty, and I have spoken with every one of them first. I stay with the search until someone is working with you, and I stand behind the hire after they start. The burden of proof is mine.
Employers with large international or English-speaking teams, whose enablement programming runs in Dutch or assumes Dutch context, and leaves that part of the workforce out.
Two layers. The language and context gap, and the fact that generic AI training does not stick: people meet AI as a vending machine and mistake the ease of asking for mastery. What is missing is not tooling, it is a working method that survives the next model release.
A five-session sprint per leader, each session ending in something they keep. Most programmes end with a certificate. A sprint ends with a discipline, a brain, and an engine.
A European real estate developer and investor, from November 2025 to March 2026: a workshop in Prague for the global legal team, then one-to-one working sessions with four leaders in four countries, on live matters, in single hours between board meetings.
KvK 42085435
TechExpats is the registered trade name of a Dutch sole proprietorship owned by Alon Gildoni. Contracts and invoices carry the TechExpats name and its KvK number.
Registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, KvK 42085435. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. VAT invoicing, standard Dutch terms, and a written assignment before any work starts.
English, Dutch and Hebrew, across the Netherlands and Europe. Running the community since 2018.
We start with the real problem behind the hire, not just the job description: what has been tried, why it failed, and what success looks like in twelve months.
I go into a network built since 2018 and approach strong passive candidates directly, discreetly, and on your behalf. This is where the work is.
You meet one to three people, each one spoken with and assessed for fit, not a stack of CVs. You spend your time deciding, not filtering.
For nearly twenty years I built and led product and technology organisations, which means I was the one hiring: writing the brief, reading the CVs, running the interviews, making the offers, and living with the result for the two years afterwards. I am not a consultant who studied hiring from the outside. I know what a wrong hire costs because I have paid for one.
I coach senior professionals through exactly these decisions, close to three hundred of them so far. That is not a sideline, it is the reason I can tell you what a strong passive candidate will actually move for, and what makes them stop reading your message at the second line.
Since 2018 I have run the international technology community here, thousands of people who know my name before they read my message. When I approach someone on your behalf, it gets read. That is the difference between access and a licence to a sourcing tool.
Israeli, Dutch and wider European working cultures, in three languages. Whether a title means what it says, whether an unusual background is a risk or the whole point, and how to word an offer so it is heard the way you meant it. That fluency is not a nice extra in an international search, it is the search.
One person from the brief to the signature. The caseload is small by design, so the answer to “who is actually working on this” is always the same person you briefed.
A job description is a guess written before the search has taught anyone anything. I call two or three times a week with sharpening questions, come to your office to meet the people the hire will work beside, and sometimes bring someone the page would have screened out, with the reason. I start from the problem, not the solution, the way a product leader does.
The right person exists. Let's find them.
Some employers cannot advertise a role at all. Sometimes that is security. Sometimes a seat is still occupied and the person in it does not know. Sometimes the fact that you are hiring is itself the information you cannot afford to release. That is the shape of search I am set up for, and it sets the rules for everything else here.
Not the company, not the search, not the outcome, and not once it is finished either. There are no case studies on this site, no logo wall and no client list, and that is not an oversight. Any search can run on direct approach alone, with nothing public at all.
I can run an entire first round without naming you. Nobody learns what you are building, which team is short, or that you are in the market at all, from the way I approach people.
Signed before you tell me anything, not after. For the work I take on this is the normal case rather than a special request, so you never have to be the one who asks.
The absence of references on this page is the same protection, already being applied. If you would find it reassuring to see other employers named here, ask yourself how the one before you would feel about it.
If discretion is why you are reading this page instead of calling an agency, that is the right instinct.
We have an enormous cultural asset here, the directness, the drive, and the ability to take ownership quickly and efficiently.
Tell me about the search. I will assess whether it is a fit for my network and current capacity, and respond within 24 hours.