Three hundred and five thousand. (305.000)
That’s the number of employees who changed employers in the second quarter of 2025. It sounds big, until you notice that, three years earlier, the same figure was 358,000. In percentage terms, we’ve gone from 4.7 percent of all employees switching jobs in Q2 2022, to just 3.8 percent today.
The raw numbers say “decline.” But behind them, there’s a more interesting story: the psychology of staying put, the cost of change, and the shared risk between employee and employer.
The Temperature of the Labor Market
In 2022, the Dutch labor market was at its hottest in years. Recruiters were practically hunting in broad daylight. People jumped ship because they could, and because the odds of landing somewhere better were high.
Now? The market has cooled. Not frozen, but the wind is different. That breeze of “I can always find something else” has slowed. This is not just an economic phenomenon; it’s an emotional one. Employees are less willing to leap without knowing where they’ll land.
Who Jumps, Who Stays
The CBS figures tell us something important:
- 62 percent of job changers in Q2 2025 came from flexible contracts.
- 38 percent came from permanent ones.
This is consistent with human behavior: those with less job security are more willing, or forced, to move. But what’s new is that even among flexible workers, the switching rate is slowing.
Certain sectors feel the slowdown more than others.
- Commercial jobs: from 7.1% job-changers in 2022 down to 5.3% in 2025.
- Business economics/administration: from 4.9% to 3.3%.
- Transport/logistics: from 6.7% to 5.5%.
The only categories bucking the trend? Agriculture and service professions.
The Tenure Effect And the Hidden Cost of Change
Here’s where the numbers whisper something deeper. If you’ve been in a job less than a year, your probability of leaving is still the highest of all groups, 7.3 percent in 2025. But that’s down sharply from 9.4 percent in 2022.
In other words: even the most mobile workers are staying longer.
Why?
- Fear of not finding better. The “better offer” isn’t guaranteed anymore.
- The invisible onboarding tax. Switching jobs means learning systems, cultures, and politics all over again. That’s exhausting, and people know it.
- Post-pandemic recalibration. Many employees burned through their appetite for upheaval during the COVID years.
For employers, this means the “return on tenure” is changing. A long-serving employee can still grow, but the growth curve isn’t automatic. It depends on whether the company actively invests in them, or quietly assumes loyalty will take care of itself.
The Employer’s Dilemma: Train or Chase?
Every time an employee leaves, a hidden invoice lands on the employer’s desk:
- Recruitment cost
- Lost productivity during the vacancy
- Time for the new hire to reach full effectiveness
If the departing person was in a role that requires significant expertise, that invoice grows. Sometimes, keeping an employee isn’t about raising salaries, it’s about making their growth inside the company feel more valuable than the promise of a new job outside.
But there’s a twist. The more experienced the employee, the more expensive it is for their next employer to train them, not because they lack skills, but because unlearning old processes can be harder than learning from scratch. That’s why some companies quietly prefer hiring less experienced people: the cultural shaping is easier.
So, What’s Really Going On?
We are in a subtle shift. Not a crisis, but a rebalancing of expectations:
- Employees are weighing stability versus possibility differently.
- Employers can no longer rely on market heat to “refresh” their teams.
- The investment in in-house training may soon be less about retention and more about risk insurance, because if people do stay, they need to grow, or they will eventually leave at the worst possible moment.
In 2022, the labor market was a chessboard with many fast moves. In 2025, it looks more like a Go board: slower, more strategic, and with every placement carrying more weight for the long game.
The question isn’t just how many people change jobs. It’s why they move, and why they stay.
And for both sides, the risk is the same: in a cooling market, the wrong move can cost more than the game itself.
Co-Creator of Xtroverso | Head of Global GRC @ ZENTRIQ™
Paolo Maria Pavan builds systems that balance rules with freedom, clarity with transformation. In his third life, he writes and speaks openly about markets, governance, and risk, not as a trader chasing price, but as a reader of patterns, behaviors, and distortions. A serial entrepreneur shaped by failure and reinvention, he sees governance as a living force for trust and progress, and refuses to avoid the hard conversations that make it real.
