You found the job in English. The team page is in English. The interview will be in English. Then the application form asks for a motivatiebrief, and suddenly you are not sure whether you are being asked for a cover letter, a personal statement, or something with rules nobody has told you about.
It is a cover letter. But it is not the cover letter you are used to writing, and the difference is not cosmetic. Getting it wrong is one of the quieter reasons strong international candidates get filtered out of Dutch applications.
Motivatiebrief means motivation letter, and it means it literally
The word splits into two parts: motivatie and brief. Motivation, and letter. That naming is not decoration. It tells you what the document is for.
In the US and the UK, the cover letter has drifted over the last two decades into a prose summary of the CV. You restate your years of experience, your headline achievements, your skills, and you wrap it in confident language. The Dutch version never drifted. It answers one question and only one: why this role, at this organisation, now, and why you specifically.
The reader already has your CV attached. They will read it. Restating it in paragraph form does not add information, and in a working culture that treats padding as a small act of disrespect for the reader's time, it actively costs you.
Here is the test. Take your draft, swap the company name for a different company in the same sector, and read it again. If it still works, you have written a summary, not a motivatiebrief. A real one should break the moment you change the employer.
When it is expected, and what happens if you skip it
In the Netherlands the letter sits much closer to a default requirement than it does in the US or the UK. Dutch job ads routinely close with a line like stuur je CV en motivatiebrief, and when the ad names it, someone reads it. It is not a formality that gets skimmed and discarded.
Skip it when it was asked for and you have sent one of two signals, neither good: you did not read the ad carefully, or you are applying in volume and this role is not really the point. Dutch hiring managers tend to read both interpretations uncharitably.
There are cases where it is genuinely optional. Recruiter-led approaches, agency and secondment roles, and some high-volume tech pipelines in Amsterdam and Rotterdam will take a CV alone. Several international scale-ups have also replaced the attached letter with structured questions inside the application system, of the "why do you want to work here" and "what draws you to this team" variety. Do not be fooled by the change of packaging. That is the motivatiebrief, broken into fields. Answer it with the same care you would give the letter.
The structure a Dutch reader expects
The address block
Dutch application letters keep a genuine letter format, even as a PDF attachment. Top left or top right, your own details: name, street and number, postcode and city, phone, email.
Below that, the employer block: company name, an attention line for the contact person, and their address. Then place and date on their own line, in Dutch order, for example Rotterdam, 12 september 2026. Then a subject line: Betreft: sollicitatie medior data-analist.
If you are applying through a portal that only accepts a text box, a lighter version is fine. But keep the place and date line and keep the subject line. They cost you two lines and they quietly tell the reader you know how this is done here.
The salutation
Without a name: Geachte heer/mevrouw. With a name: Geachte mevrouw De Vries or Geachte heer Bakker. Surname only, never the first name, and note that Dutch surname prefixes like De, Van and Van der are capitalised when the first name is not present.
Beste is the warmer option and is normal at younger companies and startups. If the whole ad is written in informal Dutch or in casual English, Beste will not read as too familiar.
Find the name. Dutch ads almost always list a contact for questions about the vacancy, and organisations here are flat enough that addressing a hiring manager directly is completely normal rather than presumptuous. If you write in English, Dear Ms De Vries is fine.
The opening
Name the role exactly as advertised, say where you saw it, and put your actual motivation in the same breath. No warm-up, no scene-setting sentence about your lifelong interest in the sector.
The body
One or two paragraphs, and this is where the letter earns its name. Say something specific and true about this employer: a product decision they made, the market they operate in, a way of working they describe on their own careers page, a constraint their sector lives with. Then bridge: what you bring that serves that specific thing.
Bring evidence, but only one or two pieces, and frame each as what it lets you do for them rather than as an achievement you are proud of. This is the paragraph that separates a real letter from a template.
This is also where you handle the practical facts plainly, in a sentence or two, if they apply: your notice period, whether you already have the right to work in the Netherlands, when you could start, whether you are relocating and when. Dutch recruiters read this as helpful rather than presumptuous. Leaving them to guess is the worse option.
The closing and sign-off
Short. Say you would welcome a conversation and stop. Do not thank the reader three times for their valuable time.
Then Met vriendelijke groet, a blank line, and your name. That is the whole sign-off. In English, Kind regards does the same job. If you want to note the attachment, one line does it: Bijlage: curriculum vitae.
Length and tone: one page, and no build-up
One page. Roughly three to four short paragraphs, somewhere around 300 to 400 words. If it runs to a second page, the problem is almost never that you have too much to say. It is that you started too far back.
Dutch professional writing values directness the way other cultures value diplomacy. The point comes first, the qualification comes after, and the reader assumes that anything you took a long time to say was probably not that important.
The two failure modes, by name
Over-formality. This is the classic French and Spanish habit. A ceremonial opening address, an elaborate closing formula, and a full paragraph of deference before the letter says anything. Translated into a Dutch reading context, this does not signal respect. It signals distance, and it signals that the writer is padding.
Over-selling. This is the classic US habit. Passionate, world-class, thrilled, proven track record, results-driven. Dutch readers apply a heavy discount to superlatives, and a letter built out of them reads as either insecure or slightly untrustworthy. Confidence in Dutch business writing looks like a plain declarative sentence about something you actually did.
The target sits between the two: direct, specific, unhurried, and free of both ceremony and adjectives.
Write it in English, or attempt Dutch?
English is genuinely fine in a large part of the Dutch market. If the ad is in English, the team language is English, and the company is an international employer in the Randstad, tech, research or finance, nobody will hold an English letter against you. Writing bad Dutch is worse than writing good English.
Dutch matters more than people expect in the rest of the market: smaller companies outside the big cities, the public sector, healthcare, education, local government, and anything customer-facing. If the ad itself is in Dutch, that is your answer.
There is an honest middle path that works well. Write the letter in English, but open with one or two short Dutch sentences saying where you actually are with the language and what you are doing about it, then switch. Naming a real level, or the course you are following, sends a signal a monolingual English letter cannot. Do not overstate it. You will be tested in the first five minutes of the interview.
What the letter must do that the CV cannot
Your CV covers what, when, where and how much. The letter covers why, and the reasoning behind it.
- Why you are changing direction, if you are
- Why the Netherlands, and why now
- What you understood about this employer that a generic applicant would not have
- Your practical situation: permit, notice, start date, location
- Evidence that you can write clearly, which for many roles is itself part of the assessment
A workable rule: no sentence in the letter should be a rewritten version of a bullet in the CV.
A weak opening and a strong one
Weak:
I am writing to apply for the position of Data Analyst at your company. I am a highly motivated professional with five years of experience in data analysis and a proven track record of delivering results in fast-paced environments.
Nothing here is wrong, and that is the problem. No source, no specific role, no company, three superlatives, and the second sentence is the CV in prose.
Strong:
I am applying for the Data Analyst role in your logistics team, which I saw on your careers page on 2 September. What caught my attention is that you build route planning in-house instead of buying it. I spent the last three years building delivery forecasting models for a parcel network in Lyon, and in-house routing data is exactly the part of that problem I want to keep working on.
Same length. Names the role and the source, says something only someone who read the site could say, and the evidence arrives as a reason rather than as a boast.
The other half of the application
The letter is one document of two, and the Dutch CV has its own conventions that differ from the American resume and the British CV: how personal details are handled, whether to include a photo, how much space to give side activities, and what Dutch recruiters expect to see at the top of page one. Our companion guide to the Dutch CV covers that side.
Before you send it
- Export as PDF, named clearly, with your name and the role in the filename
- One page, no exceptions
- The company name is correct in every single place it appears
- The contact person's name is spelled correctly, with the surname prefix capitalised
- Nothing in the letter repeats a CV bullet word for word
- The sign-off is Met vriendelijke groet, or Kind regards, and nothing more elaborate
- Read the opening sentence alone. If it could be sent to any employer in the sector, rewrite it before anything else.