Hale, a headhunter who works with Dutch scale-ups, sat down for our TechMind Series and casually described the moment tech hiring quietly broke.

“You have a generative AI tool producing a resume or an application letter, and another AI tool looking at it,” he told us. “It’s not working very well at this moment.”

He is being polite. It is not working at all.

The Maths of a Typical Dutch Scale-up Job

A regular software or data role at an Amsterdam scale-up now draws around 200 applicants, most of them submitted in twenty seconds via LinkedIn’s Easy Apply button and a cover letter Claude wrote in ten. On the other side, another AI filters those applicants down. Good candidates with slightly unusual profiles get quietly dropped because they do not match the pattern the filter is tuned for.

If you have been applying and hearing nothing back, this is why. Not you. The pipeline.

What Hale Sees Working Instead

His advice is simple, low-tech, and refuses to be automated:

• Build a real portfolio, not just a LinkedIn PDF. For software candidates, his clients look at GitHub before they look at LinkedIn. Show the work.
• Skip the recruiter. Message the hiring manager. Recruiters are overloaded and paid to filter people they do not know. The CTO or head of technology is not.
• Ask a real question about the job. Read the description, then message the hiring manager with something like: “I noticed you are combining X with Y. How is that working with your new machine learning platform?” That question, Hale says, gets forwarded to the recruiter with a note attached. That note is your shortcut.
• Bring your whole self. Amateur athletics, volunteering, cooking, a side project. Hale has clients who pick candidates with a strong sports background over pristine résumés because they know those people can work in a team and perform under pressure.

The Six-Month Plan

Hale’s step-by-step for a student who wants a real tech role in six months looks nothing like a job-board scroll:

1. Build a Google Sheet of ten to fifteen companies you actually respect.
2. Find the hiring manager or CTO at each one.
3. Send a genuinely interested, well-researched message with a real question.
4. Keep building the portfolio in the background.

That approach beats 200 Easy Apply submissions every time.

If you want a degree programme that actively pushes you to build the kind of portfolio Hale’s clients will click on, take a look at the BS in Software Engineering or the BS in Data Science. Both are built around real projects, so by the time you graduate you have a GitHub worth linking to.