20+ years in, and it still feels like magic

Douwe started recruiting at 18, working at Randstad while studying in Amsterdam. His first assignment? Hiring hundreds of security guards for a new prison dealing with an influx of drug couriers. Not exactly glamorous, but it sparked something. Over the next two decades he moved through nearly every industry: automotive, consumer electronics, retail, startups, and scale-ups. For the past seven years he's been contracting, onboarding into new companies at speed and delivering from day one.

When asked what belief most recruiters would disagree with, his answer was unexpected: "I believe in magic. Whatever you put in, you get out. I've been doing this for more than 20 years and it's happened too often not to believe in some kind of faith that puts me in front of the right person at the right time."

Data, gut feeling, and a bit of magic. That's his formula.

Know the business before you talk about talent

Douwe's approach to every new company is the same: learn the business so well you could work in it. He starts with macroeconomics, works down to the product, the strategy, the team challenges. Only then does he think about talent.

"My goal is always to speak the language of the business, to integrate into the DNA of a company. I want to know the intricacies of the product, which problem it's solving, before I have conversations about actual vacancies."

His wife jokes that it takes her six months to onboard at a new company. Douwe does it in a day. He reads everything, researches obsessively, and by the time he's calling candidates, he's already telling a compelling story about why this company matters. That's why leaders don't just talk to him about talent. They talk to him about the business.

Recruitment has been an admin function for 20 years

Douwe doesn't sugarcoat it. A lot of recruitment over the past two decades has been reactive: waiting for assignments, managing processes, doing administrative work. He hated that side of it. His wife was a recruitment coordinator who handled scheduling and admin. "That's why I met you. You complete me. Because I'm horrible at that."

He sees the shift toward AI and automation as personally exciting because it moves the function exactly where he's always operated: as a talent strategist. Supported by AI, supported by data, but having real conversations on the front end with the business to translate strategy into hiring plans.

TA teams will be cut in half

For a mid-size company of around 500 people, Douwe sees the historic TA team of three (one senior, two junior/mid recruiters handling 10-15 roles) getting cut down significantly. His prediction: most teams will shrink by about 50%.

The most progressive companies might try something radical: a hiring-manager-only TA function where automation handles the process and hiring managers review the output. He's not saying it'll work, and he's not saying it's good. But companies will try it because the tools are making it possible.

Mid-size companies in particular are in an interesting spot. They'll likely be slow followers, but they can learn from both corporate experimentation and startup necessity. "Wait until everything is innovated, then make it better. An Apple-like approach."

How TA leaders should prepare

His advice to TA leaders facing this shift is practical. Tie yourself directly to the business strategy. Be transparent about what you cost and what you deliver. Don't cut too soon because you won't get the budget back. And most importantly: start innovating now.

"If you don't test and try now, you'll be surprised when the business says you need to cut your team by 40%. Then you won't know what to do."

He recommends preparing scenarios. If your leader comes to you asking for cost cuts, you should already have a plan. "That tells your leader that you're a thoughtful leader, you're future-looking, you're tied to the business economics." And it positions you better when you eventually need to ask for budget back.

Partner with finance, not just HR

One of Douwe's most surprising partnerships was with the finance team. He asked them to pull all recruitment costs across the company. Agency spend, tooling, allocated budgets. Then he built a business case: if we improve our sourcing conversion by just 10%, that's 100K we can redirect from agency spend into better tools.

"Use money that's already spent. They don't have to ask for more money. You're getting it from a different area." It sounds obvious, but most TA leaders never do this exercise. They struggle to get 30-40K for a solution while sitting on a much larger budget they haven't fully mapped.

Innovation starts before permission

Douwe's mantra: "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission." He gave team members side assignments to explore tooling and prepare for the inevitable question about team cuts. They ran trials, had vendor conversations, and built business cases with real results before ever asking for budget.

"Don't ask for cost first. Get some results first. Then build a business case based on those results. If you cannot have that conversation with your business leader, they will not give you the budget."

If you're standing still, you're falling behind

Douwe recently saw a team that had given up. They were called the weakest link in the company. There was no soul left. His message to anyone in that situation: ask yourself why you're in recruitment. If you believe nothing will change, if you think you can keep doing what you did yesterday with the same results, the world will pass you by.

"If you're not moving with the world, you're moving against it." And for those who are forced out of recruitment entirely? Listen to yourself. What makes you happy? Skills are transferable. His own wife left recruitment to become a ceramicist. The point isn't to stay in the profession. The point is to find work that makes you want to wake up in the morning.

The two metrics that tell you everything

Out of all possible recruitment metrics, Douwe focuses on two: conversion ratio and candidate experience NPS. Together, they tell him everything about how his team is performing, how well they match requirements to roles, how happy managers are, and how talent moves through the process.

He's especially obsessed with the conversion between recruiter screen and hiring manager screen. "The better my recruiters are, the deeper they are integrated with the business, the higher those conversion ratios will be." His ideal state? 100% conversion. Every candidate his team puts forward eventually gets hired. It'll probably never happen, but working toward it forces the right behaviors: knowing the business, knowing the teams, knowing exactly what good looks like.

The Sonos story: 9 months, one hire, and a courage award

When asked about the one hire that taught him the most, Douwe told the story of hiring a marketing leader for Sonos' Nordic expansion. He found the candidate through a referral chain: a contact at Nike who wasn't the right fit himself but introduced someone named Nini, a former Facebook and Nike marketer who was about to launch her own consultancy.

Douwe was sold after the first conversation. Then halfway through the process, Sonos announced a hiring pause. Instead of accepting it, he escalated all the way to the US headquarters. His argument: pausing would destroy the candidate experience, contradict the company's core value that "the experience matters," and signal insecurity to a world-class candidate.

He got the green light. He flew to Copenhagen, was completely transparent with the candidate about what happened and why, and even brought her a rare Blue Note Sonos speaker that matched her home office color scheme. Nine months from first conversation to signed offer. She joined as head of marketing for the Nordics, eventually moved to headquarters, and ended up leading all of marketing. She stayed until last year. He hired her in 2015.

That hire earned Douwe the Sonos Courage Award, given to TA partners who challenged the status quo and stood up for what they believed in.

Hiring manager readiness: the TA partner could say no

At Sonos, the TA partner had the mandate to tell a hiring manager they weren't ready to hire. If a manager hadn't completed their 90-day onboarding, they couldn't open a role. The reasoning was clear: you can't hire for a company you don't fully understand yet.

"The hiring manager owns the hire. Recruitment owns the process. That means the hiring manager needs to be visible, present, and show care at every touchpoint. You cannot do that for five roles. If you're really good, you can do three."

They ran quarterly full-day training sessions for new leaders. Not interview technique training. The full hiring philosophy, strategy, roles, and expectations. Every leader who walked out knew what was expected, why, and how the partnership with TA worked.

The holy grail: hiring before there's a vacancy

Douwe's definition of a truly strategic TA function: hiring for roles that don't exist yet. Anticipating business needs because you know the business deeply enough to see what's coming. Offering opportunistic talent that influences business decisions.

"If you can do that, then you're truly a strategic talent function. You influence the business decisions based on the talent you bring forward." He's done it. At Sonos, he hired a VP of Marketing before the current one had even left, because he knew what was coming.

This only works in talent-driven companies where the most important thing a leader does is hire well. At Sonos, that was explicitly stated to every new leader: the most important thing you'll do here is the people you hire.

Advice for job seekers: trust the process and stay yourself

Douwe is currently looking for his next permanent role after seven years of contracting. He's experienced the rejection firsthand, the out-of-hand rejections that make you question your abilities. His advice to candidates is personal and honest.

Trust that the right role will become visible at the right time. Don't make rejections personal. Lean on your network and make sure people know exactly what you're looking for, your timeline, which roles you'd accept and which you wouldn't. And most importantly: stay 100% transparent about who you are. The moment you start tweaking yourself to match what you think companies want to hear, you'll never find the place where you can be your true self.

"I've had moments where I doubted myself. Many. But I need to stay positive because if you think positive, positive things will happen."

The takeaway

Douwe's career is a masterclass in what happens when a recruiter refuses to stay in the administrative lane. He's spent 20 years embedding himself in businesses, speaking their language, sitting in their meetings, and earning the kind of trust that turns TA from a support function into a strategic partner. His playbook is clear: know the business inside out, prepare for the cuts before they come, partner with finance, innovate without asking permission, and never settle for being just a process manager. The recruiters who survive the next wave of change won't be the ones clinging to how things were done. They'll be the ones who already moved.