Last week I met a woman who had been searching for a job here in the Netherlands for 5 months. She graduated from a local university, has lived in the country for 6 years, and is in the final stretch of her path to citizenship — just 1 more year of work on a long-term visa to go. That’s exactly why she chose the Highly Skilled Migrant (Kennismigrant) visa: it’s long-term and opens that path.

One of the main problems: companies either don’t know this visa exists, or don’t realize that the salary threshold for it is lower than the general one. But there was another, more technical pain point: before submitting each application, you have to manually check whether the company is listed in the official IND register — a list of recognized sponsors that currently includes over 12,000 entries.

We automated that.

Here’s what we built:

• Downloaded the full sponsor list from the IND website into Google Sheets
• Set up a workflow triggered via a Telegram bot
• The system searches LinkedIn for vacancies by keywords and time period (1 hour / day / week)
• Automatically cross-references each company against the register and flags it
• The result: a table with the job title, company, link, and sponsor status

There’s a small margin of error in the scoring (for example, the word “partners” can produce a false match), so the company name from the register is shown alongside the flag — so you can always do a quick visual check.

The outcome: no more manually copying data from LinkedIn. No more checking each company one by one. The focus is purely on submitting applications.

Built in an hour. Works right away.

As a next step, we’re planning (and I’ve already built parts of it before) a scoring system that compares the job description against a candidate’s CV and rates the match on a 10-point scale. Plus a system that drafts cover letters for each vacancy (it will pull from letters she’s written before).

If you’re currently job searching in the Netherlands on a Highly Skilled Migrant visa — reach out. I’ll help you set up the same thing.

Related case study: Telegram-Triggered Job Search Workflow for Sponsor-Friendly Roles in the Netherlands