Your CV is not wrong. It's written for a different market.

Most internationals show up with a CV that served them perfectly well at home, and that's exactly the problem. A Dutch recruiter is scanning for different signals, in a different length, in a different tone, and none of that has anything to do with how good you actually are at your job.

Start with length. If you were taught a CV must fit one page, let that go. Two pages is standard here, and cramming a decade of work into one page reads as thin, not sharp.

Then tone it down, literally. Dutch business writing is understated, almost blunt. Calling yourself a results-driven visionary won't read as confident, it'll read as noise a busy recruiter skims straight past. Say what you did, what changed because of it, and let the numbers do the persuading.

The line most people forget is the one that quietly kills the most applications: work authorization. A recruiter looking at a foreign name and a foreign address won't spend a call finding out whether hiring you means a permit process, they'll just move on. If you qualify for the highly skilled migrant scheme, say so near the top. It's often the difference between a callback and silence.

None of this is about pretending to be someone you're not. It's about being read correctly by someone with 30 seconds and a stack of a hundred CVs. For a longer walkthrough of formatting conventions, The Hague International Centre's guide is a solid start, though the version tailored to your actual story is the one that gets you hired.