For employers
For HR & Global Mobility
The employer engages Goodman Bureau and the household takes part. Confidentiality and a light administrative load for HR are built into how we work. This page covers what HR and Global Mobility teams usually want to know before bringing it in.
Something to circulate internally? Download the summary for HR and Global Mobility (PDF).
When should I use Goodman Bureau?
It is worth bringing us in when losing a hire would be costly: scarce skills, senior responsibility, or a slow and expensive rehire. The earlier the better. Ideally HR introduces us shortly after the employee accepts the offer, so there is time for a short first conversation and a proper pre-arrival intake around six weeks before the move. The formal six-month engagement then runs from the day the household arrives.
We are built for assignments and permanent relocations of roughly a year or more. For anything shorter, there is not enough time after settling in for the work to earn its place, and we will tell you that up front.
Which employees qualify?
That is HR's decision. Any internationally recruited employee moving to Greater Amsterdam can take part, whether they are relocating on their own or bringing a partner, children, or another dependant.
The one limit is scope. If a household's needs are mainly clinical or crisis-related, that sits outside what we do, and we will raise it early so HR can arrange the right kind of support.
How does this fit with our relocation provider?
We sit alongside a relocation management company or destination service provider and cover a different part of the move: the continued, household-level support and cultural coaching that a relocation package is not designed to provide. We can run in parallel with your provider, or on our own.
We handle the practical preparation for BSN, municipality, and IND appointments: which documents to bring, what each appointment involves, and where people commonly come unstuck. It does not give legal advice or representation, which stays with your immigration provider and the IND. We also introduce households to trusted local professionals, from makelaars to tax advisors to language schools to a huisarts, and takes no referral fee for doing so.
We do not organise flights, temporary accommodation, the physical move, or anything else a relocation provider already handles well.
What does HR know, and not know?
Each month HR receives a short status: on track, or watch if we have a concern worth noting, along with a brief note on how much contact the household is choosing to have. A household that engages lightly, or steps back entirely, is never reported as a problem. That is their choice to make.
At 90 and 180 days, HR receives a fuller report with the aggregate measures set out below: integration confidence, social-network development, practical independence, household satisfaction, and the practical issues resolved along the way. Where a client has a single household, that report still comes, at a household level.
What HR does not receive is the substance of what a household talks through with us. Those conversations, and the Household Integration Plan the household builds with us across the engagement, stay between the two of them. If something rises to a genuine risk to the assignment, HR hears about the risk, on a one-business-day timeline, without the personal detail behind it. More on that below.
HR decides who on the team receives all of this.
How much time does HR spend administering it?
Very little. HR makes one email introduction between us and the household. From there, we handle the household's onboarding and consent directly. Each month there is a short email to read, a few minutes at most. If a team wants to be more involved than that, they are welcome to, and we will set that up with them. Otherwise the running cost to HR is close to nothing.
How do we measure whether it is working?
We track a set of measures across the engagement and report them back so HR can see the trajectory. These are a picture of how a household is finding its feet, not targets we have promised to hit.
The measures, taken at the start of the engagement and again at 30, 90, and 180 days:
- Integration confidence, for the employee and for an accompanying partner
- How the household's local social network is developing
- Practical independence in day-to-day Dutch life
- Overall household satisfaction with the move
- The practical friction and issues we have helped resolve
- The household's own sense of whether they intend to stay in the Netherlands
- Feedback from HR and Global Mobility on how the engagement is running
Most of these are self-reported by the household, so they reflect how the move feels from the inside. We do not promise a particular retention figure or a guaranteed integration result. What we offer is a clear, honest picture of how a household is finding its feet, and the room to act early if that picture is not what anyone hoped for.
What happens if an assignment is identified as at risk?
We use two levels. A monthly status can say watch, which means we have a concern we are keeping an eye on and working through with the household. That is routine, and most watches resolve.
At risk is different, and rare. It means the household is under severe cultural stress, it is unlikely to improve without significant change and professional support beyond what we provide, and as a result the assignment is unlikely to be completed as planned. When we reach that judgement, HR hears within one business day. HR is told that the household is at risk and nothing more. The personal circumstances behind it stay with the household.
At that point we advise the household to seek professional support and help them find someone suitable, ideally with cross-cultural experience. We do not hand them a phone number and step away. On the HR side, the useful options are usually to check in with the employee directly, to look at whether timelines can flex, and to point the employee towards the company's employee assistance programme. When HR does speak with the employee, it should work from what the employee has agreed can be shared.
The employee knows about this from the start. Part of onboarding is being clear that a risk flag, without detail, would go to HR.
Can we run a pilot?
Yes. A pilot is usually a small set of households, three is fine, each run as a full engagement and reviewed together at 90 and 180 days against the measures above. That gives HR a real basis for deciding whether to make us a standing part of how it supports international hires.
Pricing is per household. The commercial terms of a pilot are a direct conversation.
We run a limited number of households at any one time, so that the person doing the work stays the same person throughout each engagement. If a pilot goes well and HR wants to scale it, that is a conversation about capacity and terms, held early enough to plan around.
Data protection
The employer is the contracting party and we operate under a data processing agreement with each client. The employee and, separately, an accompanying partner each give specific written consent to what is shared with HR before any work begins. HR receives only the agreed reporting. We keep records lean, to a defined retention period, and does not record clinical detail. Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.