Do your agencies deliver? The numbers every CFO should know.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the Netherlands had 3.9 million flexible workers. That's 2.7 million employees on flexible contracts and 1.2 million self-employed, together accounting for 4 in every 10 working people. For CFOs, that means one thing: the flexible workforce is no longer a side issue. It's a structural cost that demands structural insight.
The flexible layer is large and fragmented. Agency workers and seconded staff account for 3.5 percent of all workers, self-employed for 10.4 percent. In between sits a growing group of on-call workers and temporary contracts that organisations manage internally. Every channel has its own rates, its own invoices and its own blind spots. And that's exactly where money leaks away.
What you see on the balance sheet and what you don't
Personnel costs are visible to CFOs. Invoices come in, hours are tracked. But the real costs of a poorly functioning flexible workforce don't appear in the books.
What you don't see: the hours planners spend chasing agencies by phone. The cost of a no-show on a busy evening. The damage to quality when inexperienced staff show up. The money you pay an agency with a fill rate of 68 percent, while another agency delivers 91 percent for the same rate.
Flex is not a luxury, it's a necessity. An organisation that tries to cover peaks, illness and seasonal pressure entirely with permanent staff ends up paying structurally too much during quiet periods. But flex also costs more per hour than permanent staff. The conversion factor that staffing agencies apply in the Netherlands averages between 2.3 and 2.9 times the gross hourly wage. That's deliberate: the agency takes on recruitment, administration and sick leave risk for you. The question is therefore not whether you use flex, but how well you do it. And anyone who doesn't measure what each agency delivers is managing their flexible workforce in the most expensive way possible: blind.
In SMEs, an average of 24 percent of revenue goes on personnel costs, according to SRA research over 2024. At that scale, "we have no visibility on agency performance" is not a planning problem. It's a financial risk.
The three numbers every CFO should know
Fill rate: how many of your requests are actually fulfilled?
This is the most direct return metric for your flex spend. You request ten staff members — how many actually show up? The difference between an agency at 70 percent and one at 90 percent fill rate is, at a hundred requests per month, twenty unfilled shifts. Twenty shifts you need to source elsewhere, with extra costs and last-minute stress as a result.
No-show rate: who confirms but doesn't come?
In 2025, the number of agency workers and seconded staff in the Netherlands fell by 8.7 percent, while employers simultaneously increased their use of on-call workers. The market is shifting and pressure on availability is growing. That makes no-shows structural. The problem is not that it happens — it does. The problem is that most clients don't know how often it happens at which agency. And so they can't act on it.
Return rate: do the same people work with you again?
A returning worker knows your location, your standards and your team. Onboarding time is shorter, mistakes are fewer, quality is higher. As a CFO, you should see this as a direct lever on quality costs. The higher an agency's return rate, the lower your actual cost per hour worked.
The question most organisations never ask
Which agency delivers the most value per euro?
Not which agency has the lowest hourly rate. Not which agency responds fastest. But which agency, measured over a quarter, combines the highest fill rate, the lowest no-show rate and the highest return rate.
Specialist staffing agencies structurally outperform large generic players, as the most recent market data from Flexnieuws shows. The traditional big four saw their Dutch revenue decline again in 2025, while specialists continued to grow. Better performance, lower hidden costs. But you can only make that choice if you have the data to compare agencies.
Why most CFOs don't have this data
Flex management is fragmented. Multiple portals, separate invoices per agency, no shared system. The information exists — spread across confirmations, timesheets and bookings — but not in one place and certainly not in a form that allows comparison.
At the end of 2025, according to CBS, there were still 380,000 open vacancies in the Netherlands. The labour market has loosened but pressure remains. Flex is here to stay. All the more reason to organise and measure its deployment properly.
Start today with these three questions to your agencies
- What percentage of our requests did you fully fulfil last quarter, and how long did it take on average to confirm a placement?
- What is the average no-show rate at our locations?
- How many of the staff you provide are returning workers?
If the answer is "we don't know exactly", then you as CFO already know enough.
Felix gives you real-time insight into the performance of all your staffing agencies in one place. So you manage on data, not gut feeling. Request a demo.
