For Topshore, as a start-up in employment services, it was quite difficult in this challenging time to find a new way of working, both at home and (as little as possible) at the office. But a crisis also creates opportunities when you are forced to do things differently overnight. Adapting working methods and dealing with the challenging commercial conditions, notwithstanding everyone’s private situation.

At Topshore we have also gone through this process. Topshore was established in early 2019 with the aim to mediate highly trained Spanish engineers at Dutch companies. At that time, there were many jobs available in the Netherlands while Spain was still recovering from the banking crisis. Many highly trained and ambitious Spanish technicians were very eager to start their working lives abroad. By investing in building a network and starting intensive partnerships with a.o. Spanish universities and industry associations, we have been able to recruit a wide range of Spanish technicians.

This way of working was fairly successful and by February 2020 this resulted in a number of candidates that were about to travel from Spain for live job interviews at different customers. Until reports of COVID-19 became increasingly serious and it was no longer possible for Spanish candidates to travel to the Netherlands.

From one day to the other we were forced to completely change our business plan and start looking for new opportunities. So we decided to focus not only on Spanish candidates but also to approach Dutch candidates. And it paid off!

In addition, we have also contacted other MeeMaken companies that were looking for candidates to fill in their vacancies. This resulted in a number of interviews with candidates for vacancies at KenzFigee and recently also at Blue Offshore.

I wish everyone the best of luck in these challenging times. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding our story, or if you want to know more about labor market communication, vacancy texts or specific recruitment issues.