The relocation game in tech has changed. But not everyone has realized it yet.

The Global Move

SubscribeSign in

The relocation game in tech has changed. But not everyone has realized it yet.

Andrew Stetsenko<br>Jul 16, 2026

Share

I’ve been involved in tech recruitment + relocation since 2011. Over the years, I think thousands of software engineers have relocated using different resources, articles, tools and products that I’ve built.<br>Relocation has always felt like my thing. My vocation. I’ve also relocated several times myself. That search for more freedom has always been an important part of my own journey.<br>The reason I’m writing this article is simple. I constantly receive LinkedIn messages, emails and comments asking more or less the same question. I try to answer as many of them as I can via my articles, but after repeating myself enough times I thought it would be better to put everything in one place. Think of this as a bonfire conversation. I just want to honestly share how I see things.<br>I’m not writing this because I think I have all the answers. I don’t. The relocation market is changing quickly, and like everyone else, I’m trying to understand it while it’s happening.<br>Before getting into my own observations, let me give you 3 numbers.<br>According to the latest report from Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system (ATS) used by tech companies, the average number of applications per job opening has nearly doubled since 2022. This report includes data from 6000 companies and 640M applications.

At the same time, recruiting teams have become much smaller, which means recruiters now handle roughly 5 times more applications individually than they did only a few years ago.

The last number comes from the Dutch IND (immigration agency). I took the Netherlands, but I believe that’s pretty much the overall picture. According to their data, the number of highly skilled migrants (aka software engineers, designers, scientists, etc) moving to the Netherlands in 2025 is almost half (13900) of what it was in 2022 (26200).

None of these numbers tells the whole story on its own. Together, though, they describe a market that’s very different from the one many of us became used to.<br>Companies receive far more applications than before. Recruiters have far less time to carefully review each one. At the same time, the number of actual relocations has generally gone down. There isn’t a single reason for that. AI is changing how software teams work and, as a result, how companies think about hiring and team growth. The post-Covid era of cheap money is over. Wars, politics and the broader economy all play a role.<br>The result is that getting a job with relocation support has become more competitive every year.<br>That doesn’t mean relocation is disappearing. It doesn’t even mean it’s becoming rare. But I do think the game has changed. And from many of the conversations I have every week, I’m not sure everyone has realized that yet.<br>What’s changed?

As we discussed earlier, relocation opportunities are becoming something closer to a luxury ticket. Or maybe a better comparison is the Olympics. The opportunities are still there, but the competition is much tougher than it used to be.<br>One thing, however, hasn’t changed. Companies still hire people from abroad for exactly the same reason they always did: they can’t hire the people they need locally.<br>Before 2022, when the tech market was booming, almost every company wanted to hire more developers. More engineers meant more products, faster growth and, in many cases, a higher company valuation. If you were a software engineer with 5 years of experience, you usually had plenty of opportunities both locally and internationally because companies genuinely struggled to fill those positions.<br>Today the situation is different. The market has shifted back towards employers. Tech was an exception for quite a few years, but many job seekers still behave as if that exception is the normal reality. It isn’t.<br>Recently I received an email from a front-end developer with around 7 years of experience. He told me he wanted to move abroad for a better future, a more stable economy, better education and more security. I completely understand those reasons. They’re good reasons to relocate.<br>The problem is that they’re your reasons, not the employer’s.<br>Employers don’t relocate people because they want to improve someone’s quality of life. They relocate people because they need to solve a hiring problem.

Companies no longer need to hire many developers simply to justify higher valuations. When they decide to sponsor someone today, they’re usually looking for expertise they genuinely can’t find locally, someone who brings unique value and someone who’s motivated enough to make the move worthwhile.<br>If all those things come together, the result may well be a better quality of life for you and your family. But that’s the outcome, not the reason.<br>That’s probably the biggest shift I’ve seen over the last...