Why 10/10 CVs still get rejection emails in the Netherlands

You followed every CV best practice. The recruiter said you were a “great match.” Three rounds, articulate answers, technical questions handled cleanly. Then the email arrives a week later: “Unfortunately, while your skills are impressive, we don’t think you’d be the right culture fit at this time.”

If you’re an expat in the Netherlands — or anywhere in northern Europe, really — you may have collected a small archive of these emails. They feel mysterious. The technical scoring went well. The work samples were strong. So what is “culture fit” actually measuring?

The honest answer, after reading thousands of CVs and sitting through hundreds of debriefs: it’s measuring whether you read the room the way the room expected to be read.

The thing the rejection email is really saying

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had a useful concept for this. He talked about habitus — the set of dispositions, postures, and unspoken assumptions you absorb from the social environment you grew up in. How you shake hands. Whether you wait to be invited to speak. Whether you describe your accomplishments in terms of “I” or “we.” Whether you push back on a senior person mid-meeting or save your concerns for after.

None of these are “right” or “wrong.” They’re just scripts — patterns that signal “this person knows how things work here.” The catch: every culture has its own scripts, and most of them operate below conscious awareness.

What feels like authenticity to you is, in another country, often legible as the wrong note in a song everyone else is humming.

When a candidate’s habitus matches the field they’re entering, everything feels frictionless. When it doesn’t, the friction shows up — not as overt rejection, but as a subtle, unsettled feeling among the interviewers. They liked you. They just couldn’t quite picture you in the team.

What this looks like in Dutch interviews specifically

Dutch professional culture is unusually flat, direct, and consensus-oriented. Some of the scripts that often go unnoticed by people from more hierarchical cultures:

• Disagreement is engagement, not aggression. If the interviewer pushes back on something you said, that’s interest. They want to see how you defend a position. Backing down looks weak; doubling down with reasoning looks confident.
• “I” is the right pronoun for your accomplishments. In cultures where modesty is the script, candidates often describe their work in collective terms (“we built”, “the team launched”). In Dutch interviews, this reads as evasive. Hiring managers want to know what you specifically did.
• Asking questions is mandatory. If you don’t ask questions at the end, you signal you’re not actually interested or not bringing critical thinking. Even if you have no real questions, generate one.
• Casualness in tone is professional. Hyper-formality reads as standoffish. The interviewer expects you to chat a bit, ask about their week, treat them as a peer rather than a gatekeeper.

None of these are listed in any “how to interview in the Netherlands” guide because they’re not articulated — they’re felt. Dutch interviewers don’t think of these as cultural rules. They think of them as just how reasonable people behave.

What to do about it

You don’t need to abandon who you are. You just need to translate — the same way you translate language. Three concrete things:

1. Audit your interview answers for “we” vs. “I”

Record yourself answering common interview questions. Listen back. Count the “we”s. Replace them with “I”s where the work was actually yours. This is the fastest, easiest fix.

2. Practice the pushback move

When an interviewer challenges your answer, don’t capitulate. Even if you’re internally panicking, say something like: “I see your point, but in this case I’d actually argue…” and then make the argument. They want to see this. They’re not testing whether you can be moved — they’re testing whether you can hold a position.

3. Bring up something they haven’t asked about

Towards the end, ask something specific about their team, their tech, their decisions. “I noticed you migrated from Postgres to ClickHouse last year — how’s that going?” This signals research, curiosity, and the level of agency they want from someone they’d actually hire.

The harder truth

Some of these scripts are unfair. International talent shouldn’t have to learn an unwritten Dutch grammar of professional behavior just to get a job they’re qualified for. Companies should be doing better at recognizing that “culture fit” often translates as “candidates who reflect the in-group’s habitus back at them.”

But pragmatically, if you’re job-hunting right now, you don’t have time to wait for hiring practices to catch up. Learning the scripts, even imperfectly, dramatically improves your odds.

And if you’ve collected a few of those rejection emails recently — it’s not your skills. It’s the silent grammar nobody told you the test was in.