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The Immigration–Onboarding Handoff: What Your International Hire Needs Before Day One
Good onboarding creates a lasting first impression, and it is a business necessity in 2026. Most employees decide within their first six months whether they want to stay, and a lot of that decision is shaped by how supported they feel from the very beginning.
Pre-boarding — giving new hires a feel for the company, culture, and team before Day 1 — has become standard good practice. But for someone relocating to the Netherlands for a new role, it looks quite different. Before they can focus on getting to know their new colleagues or hitting the ground running in their new role, they're dealing with a whole other list: finding a place to live, navigating unfamiliar bureaucracy, and trying to get their life in the Netherlands administratively up and running.
This is especially true for Highly Skilled Migrants who relocate here on their own initiative.
What Happens Between Permit Approval and Day One
Employees who arrive through the Highly Skilled Migrant scheme typically follow the same onboarding procedures as locally hired colleagues. Yet their needs are meaningfully different — and the gap tends to show up in the weeks before they even walk through the door.
Once the IND approves the permit, there's usually a few weeks to a month or two before the start date. During that time, a number of practical formalities need to be arranged — and they follow a specific sequence. Municipality registration comes first, which unlocks the BSN. The BSN is needed to apply for a DigiD. And both are typically required before arranging health insurance or opening a Dutch bank account. Each step opens the door to the next, which is why getting started early — and in the right order — matters so much. For a fuller picture of what this journey looks like from the employee's side, our guide on supporting international hires through relocation is a good place to start.
If no one has taken ownership of initiating this process before the employee arrives, your new hire ends up spending their first weeks at work simultaneously trying to make a good impression professionally and working through a to-do list they weren't properly prepared for.
Highly Skilled Migrants who feel administratively unsupported in their first weeks are more likely to experience the kind of stress that affects their overall assessment of whether the move was worth it — and whether they will stay. As we explored in our piece on retaining international talent beyond the visa, retention is decided in the months immediately following arrival, not at the two-year mark.
Building This Into Your Onboarding Programme
If your onboarding programme starts with a welcome email on Day 1 and a laptop setup guide, it isn't really designed for international hires.
The practical settling-in layer — the appointments, the documents, the registrations — needs to be built into the pre-boarding phase, with clear ownership and a timeline. Think of it as running two tracks in parallel: the cultural and professional integration elements that apply to everyone, and the administrative layer that's specific to international hires. One without the other leaves a gap that your new colleague will have to fill on their own, at the worst possible time.
In-Country Formalities
At Expat Management Group, we help HR, Global Mobility, and People teams bridge exactly this gap. We coordinate the administrative integration sequence on behalf of the employer and employee: booking Expat Center and Gemeente appointments, guiding the employee through BSN registration, facilitating DigiD applications, advising on health insurance options, and supporting bank account setup.
The goal is straightforward: your new international hire should arrive on Day 1 with the administrative infrastructure of their Dutch life already in motion — not facing it alone while trying to settle into a new job.
Ready to take the stress out of in-country formalities for your international hires? Get in touch with our team.
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