Enriching the Dutch public register of visa sponsors with detailed company information

In the 2021/2022 academic year, 40 percent of students who enrolled in their first year at a Dutch university, came from abroad. To grow its highly educated workforce and attract workers with specialist skill sets from outside the European Union, the Dutch government offers the Highly Skilled Migrant Program.

Highly Skilled Migrant program offers visas

Through this program, companies can function as visa sponsors for migrants, offering them a Dutch residence permit with an accelerated application procedure. The Dutch Statistic Netherlands Bureau CBS reports that at the end of 2021, the highly skilled migrant scheme was the most used migration program by the 87 thousand labor migrants from outside the EU/EFTA zone currently working in the Netherlands (figure 1).

The Public Register Recognized Sponsors

The Public Register Recognized Sponsors is a list of organizations that offer Dutch visa sponsorship under the Highly Skilled Migrant program. The list currently contains 10,087 company names and their Chamber of Commerce registration number (KVK-nummer in this Dutch example), but lacks further information (see Figure 2).

This lack of information makes it hard for Non-EU citizens applying for a job in the Netherlands to find relevant positions. Information such as website, branch, location of (main) office and contact details is currently missing from the register, but is vital for jobseekers in their job search. 

Dataprovider.com's web data is an out-of-the-box solution for enriching open data, such as this public register. To give an example of how our web data can be used, we enriched this public register of visa sponsors with information that is relevant for applicants from outside the EU to find positions that are suitable to their interest and field of expertise.

Enrichment Tool

When you have only snippets of information, such as a company name or a Business Registry Number, we can match it to our database of websites and supplement it with relevant context for more than 200 data points.

In the case of the Highly Skilled Migrants program, we want to add relevant data to all visa sponsors, such as a website address, location information, (region, city, and address), branch information (Standard Industrial Classification or SIC) and extracted keywords. Without any refining, we directly matched roughly 33% of the company names in the register. The hardest fields to find were company address and email address (25% and 24% respectively), and the easiest were hostname and SIC-code (36% and 34%) (see figure 3).

Pre-processing company names

The preliminary results indicate that some company names are more challenging to match to our database. To improve the number of matches, we clean up the company names in the register. We remove the mention of the legal form in company names (the Dutch BV is comparable to an LLC and N.V. is similar to an Inc). Matching the names without these abbreviations may provide better results. As an extra step, we remove common abbreviations from the names in the register and attempt to match these alternative versions of the names. The improved results are listed in Figure 3. 

Outcome

The enriched dataset contains 2,225 rows with detailed company information. Download this PDF with all the information we found and added. Using this file, it's easy to find, for example, legal companies in Amsterdam, navigate to their website and look for vacancies. Alternatively, you can query the keywords field and seek companies working with, for example, ChatGPT, and contact them directly at the extracted email address.

Have a dataset you would like to enrich? Contact us at info@dataprovider.com, and we will set you up with a free demo.