Rob van Dijk
Manager
Rob is a consultant with a passion for innovation and organizational development. He has 15 years of experience at many different companies and works with them to create a future-proof and people-oriented organization.
Deel dit artikel
Experts: Rob van Dijk & Tony Brugman (ModellenWerk / nlmtd)
“Is more people really an option?” With that provocative question, Rob van Dijk and Tony Brugman opened the second expert session at Create the Future. Their answer, backed by data from CBS, UWV and their own ModellenWerk Intelligence platform, was unambiguous: the Dutch working population is shrinking, scarcity is structural, and organisations that keep searching for more headcount are solving yesterday’s problem.
A labour market under structural pressure
The Netherlands has reached a demographic tipping point: the share of people over 65 now exceeds the share of young people entering the workforce. Nearly half of all vacancies are hard to fill, and sectors like construction, healthcare and engineering face shortages that directly limit output. At the same time, a significant number of roles — in administration, customer service, and data entry — are becoming surplus. The labour market is not just tight; it is misaligned. And it is not only a matter of quantity: participants pointed out that the quality of graduates from technical education has declined, forcing companies to invest heavily just to bring new hires up to par. Meanwhile, organisations from defence to energy are all competing for the same shrinking pool of engineers and technicians.
Five levers instead of one hiring strategy
Rather than competing harder for that same talent pool, Van Dijk and Brugman presented a framework of five workforce levers: reducing or reorganising market demand, improving talent inflow and retention, deploying innovation and technology, increasing internal efficiency, and pursuing external collaboration. Each lever was illustrated with a real-world case — from Bernhoven hospital reducing care volume through shared decision-making, to Unilever’s internal talent marketplace that redeployed over 8,000 employees, to childcare organisation Smallsteps robotizing administrative work so staff could spend more time with children. The message: organisations that only pull the hiring lever are missing four others.
From efficiency to enjoyment
The interactive discussion revealed a recurring tension between ambition and reality. As one participant put it: “We keep optimising for efficiency, but we forget that people also need to enjoy their work.” Several participants challenged the assumption that technology automatically solves the capacity problem — noting that while the vast majority of organisations have adopted some form of AI, only a fraction actually see measurable productivity gains. Others raised the invest-now-harvest-later paradox: building workforce capacity takes years, but boards want returns within one. “You have to invest now to have the capacity in a couple of years. That’s not very popular thinking in the boardrooms nowadays,” one participant observed. And underlying all of it was the human dimension of change — functional redesign is only one layer. The social layer, where people find meaning and regulate stress together, is just as critical.
“There’s only a limited amount of change that people can digest.”
Looking ahead
The session ended with practical guidance: score your organisation on all five levers, identify where untapped potential lies, and start investing now — even when the payoff is years away. The message was clear: workforce strategy can no longer be just an HR topic. It requires the same rigour and investment logic that organisations apply to technology, infrastructure and finance. The organisations that thrive will be those that stop trying to hire their way out of a structural shift, and start building the workforce their strategy actually deserves.
