The Resignation in Year Two Was Decided in Year One
An international hire can be well paid, well managed and completely alone.
The work is usually fine. Performance is solid, the team is pleasant, the salary is right and the housing is sorted. Nothing in a one-to-one suggests a problem.
What is missing sits outside the job, which is why it does not show up anywhere an employer looks.
Where colleagues stop being the social life
In many countries, colleagues are also the social circle. You eat together after work, hear about each other's families, and friendships form without anyone planning them.
Dutch working life keeps those things separate. Colleagues are friendly and helpful during the day, and then they go home to a circle that formed years ago. Most of those circles started at school.
This is not coldness and it is not personal. The boundary between work and private life simply sits in a different place.
Why the circle is hard to enter
Being pleasant to work with does not get you into one of those circles. They are stable, and they are not especially open to newcomers, whatever their nationality.
Dropping by is rare. When you do reach out, people are booked for the next few weeks. That is efficient for anyone who already has a network, and isolating for someone who does not.
So the employee is treated well at work and spends most weekends alone.
What that looks like in year two
Somewhere in year two a recruiter calls about a job back home, where the work is similar and there are already people around.
The comparison is easy, and it is not really about the job. The decision often happens in that phone call, but it was built over the year before it. By the time HR hears anything, the outcome is settled.
What the exit interview will not tell you
The reason given is usually simple. A new opportunity. Family circumstances.
Loneliness rarely reaches an exit interview, partly because it sounds like a personal failing rather than a professional one. So the organisation records an ordinary departure, learns little that would help with the next hire, and repeats the pattern.
What an employer can reasonably do
An employer cannot manufacture friendships and should not try.
What helps is somewhere the employee can think this through. Most people decide it is something about them. That they are hard to get on with, or not interesting enough. It is neither.
That belief is what stops people trying again. Someone who thinks they are the problem stops reaching out. Once that is out of the way, it becomes possible to look for other routes into a social life here, and to keep the people back home closer than a weekly update.
Structured support for expatriate staff can carry that work alongside whatever the mobility or HR team already provides.
The part of retention that sits outside the job
Retention plans for international staff tend to focus on the role, the pay and the development path. For someone who moved countries alone, those are rarely the deciding factors.
What decides it is whether a life started to form outside the office during the first year. That is considerably cheaper to support than it is to replace someone.
Kelly Kim is an NIP-registered psychologist and workplace mental health specialist supporting international and Korean organisations in the Netherlands.
