Know who is in your Belgian market before you commit to hiring in it. We identify and profile the people who could do the role, record the working languages that decide whether they are appointable at all, benchmark total packages rather than gross base salary, and tell you how long notice will realistically take.
We are a research consultancy, not a recruitment agency. Every project is a fixed fee for the research — never commission, never a percentage of salary. We hold no off-limits list, so no part of your Belgian market is closed to us. Every record we produce is handed over and stays yours.
Every figure below was checked against the primary source named beside it on 19 October 2026. Where we could not confirm a figure against the issuing authority directly, the row says so rather than dressing a secondary source up as an official one.
| What | Current position | Why it changes the research — and where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Notice on dismissal now depends on when the contract started | Three parallel regimes run side by side | Contracts whose performance began between 1 January 2014 and 31 May 2026 follow the original table, which exceeds 52 weeks at long seniority. Contracts beginning 1 June 2026 or later are capped at 52 weeks from 17 years' seniority. Contracts beginning 1 August 2026 or later are additionally cut to one week's notice throughout the first six months. Two people with identical seniority can therefore carry materially different notice. Notice periods — employment contract from 01/01/2014 onward, dismissal by the employer — FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue Primary source |
| Notice table — selected anchors | 6 months 6 wks · 1 yr 8 · 2 yrs 12 · 5 yrs 18 · 10 yrs 33 · 15 yrs 48 | Employer-initiated notice, weeks. From 17 years the newer regimes cap at 52 weeks; the pre-June-2026 regime continues past it. Seniority runs to the day before notice starts. Notice periods — employment contract from 01/01/2014 onward, dismissal by the employer — FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue Primary source |
| Wage indexation — temporary cap from 1 June 2026 | Unchanged up to €4,000 gross per month; capped above it | A Programme Act in force since 1 June 2026 temporarily limits indexation on the portion of salary above €4,000 and pairs it with a new employer social security contribution. This materially changes senior-level pay trajectories and therefore any benchmark that assumed full indexation. Confirm the current position in the Moniteur belge for a specific case. Belgium: temporary exemption to automatic indexation of remuneration — DLA Piper global employment update (secondary; confirm in the Moniteur belge) Secondary — verify |
| What pay is indexed against | The smoothed health index, published monthly | It excludes alcohol, tobacco, petrol and diesel. Mechanisms differ by joint committee — some index annually in January, others on a pivot-threshold trigger — so a benchmark is only readable with its index date attached. Statbel — consumer price index and health index — Statbel, Belgian statistical office Primary source |
| Sectoral pay scales | Set by joint committees (paritair comité / commission paritaire) | Minimum scales (barema) by function and seniority. Two employers in what looks like one industry can sit under different committees and therefore different scales, so the governing committee is established before any pay comparison. Joint committees (paritair comité / commission paritaire) — FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue Primary source |
| Language of employment documents | Follows the region of the establishment | Dutch in Flanders, French in Wallonia, German in the German-speaking community, with Brussels bilingual. Beyond the legal point, working language is the sharpest practical filter on who is appointable. Employment contracts — language requirements — FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue Primary source |
This is research context, not legal, tax or immigration advice, and employment law moves. Where a decision turns on a point of Belgian law, take specialist advice on that point — we will say so when we think you should, and we will tell you which of our figures your adviser should re-check.
Talent mapping is the structured research process of identifying and profiling the people who could fill a defined set of roles in a defined market, before a vacancy exists. A talent map records who those people are, which organisations employ them, their function, seniority, location, working languages and tenure, how the teams around them are structured, and — where scoped — what the market pays. It exists so that hiring and workforce decisions are made against researched evidence rather than against whoever happens to apply.
A talent map is a research asset, not a candidate list. It is commissioned to answer a business question — can we staff this plan in Belgium, from where, at what cost, against which competitors, and how long will it actually take — and it keeps its value long after the first hire is made. Because Audentia clients own the data outright, a single map is routinely used for a year or more of hiring.
The research combines talent identification (finding the relevant people), market analysis (how large and accessible the population really is), competitor analysis (how rival organisations are built), and talent profiling (recording each individual consistently enough that people from differently-structured employers can actually be compared).
The three terms get used interchangeably, and they are not the same thing. Talent research is the underlying discipline: verified, structured gathering of data on a defined population. Talent mapping is a research project with a market boundary and a deliverable — the map. Talent intelligence is the analytical layer that turns that data into a view a leadership team can act on, and keeps it current. You can buy any of the three on its own, and most clients eventually buy all three in sequence.
Sourcing starts with a live vacancy and looks for people who will apply for it now. Talent mapping starts with a business question and describes the entire relevant population, whether or not those people are available today.
The practical difference is coverage and shelf life. A sourcing exercise stops when a shortlist is full. A mapping exercise does not stop until the defined market is covered, which means it captures the people who were not looking, the ones who said no this quarter, and the competitor structures that explain why the market behaves the way it does. That is why a map keeps earning after the first hire, and a shortlist does not. We do both — see talent sourcing below — but they answer different questions and should be bought for different reasons.
Talent mapping is used at the point where a plan is still reversible — before headcount is signed off, before a site is chosen, before a leadership team is designed, before an acquisition is priced. It answers the question underneath all of them: does the talent this plan depends on actually exist, in reach, at a cost we can carry? That is a different question from can we fill this role, and it needs a different kind of evidence.
For the full methodology and comparison frameworks in depth, see our main talent mapping services page, or the plain-English explainer at what is talent mapping. This page covers Belgium specifically.
Audentia Research runs ten research service lines. These are the ones Belgian clients commission most often, and the question each one is actually bought to answer.
| Service | The question it answers | Who commissions it |
|---|---|---|
| Talent mapping | Who could do this role in Belgium, where do they work, and how reachable are they? | Talent acquisition and HR leadership, workforce planning |
| Talent market mapping | How large, how deep and how expensive is this Belgian market really? | Strategy, workforce planning, market-entry teams |
| Competitor talent mapping | How are our Belgian competitors staffed and structured, and where are they hiring? | Executive teams, strategy, talent acquisition |
| Executive talent mapping | Who could credibly lead this function in Belgium, and could we actually get them? | CEOs, boards, CHROs, investors |
| Talent intelligence | What is changing in this market, and what should we do about it? | Leadership teams, people analytics, strategy |
| Talent research | Can we have verified, structured data on a defined Belgian population? | In-house research teams, search firms, investors |
| Talent sourcing | Can someone find and qualify the people for our live Belgian roles? | Talent acquisition teams, hiring managers |
| Talent pipelining | Can we be ready to hire in Belgium before the role goes live? | Talent acquisition, succession and workforce planning |
| RPO support | Can you run the research and sourcing layer inside our Belgian hiring process? | In-house TA functions, incumbent RPO providers, scaling employers |
| Diversity research | What does the diverse talent landscape in Belgium actually look like? | CHROs, DEI leads, boards |
Every service above is priced as a fixed project fee or an agreed day rate. None of them carries a placement commission or a percentage of salary, and on all of them the data produced is handed over to you permanently. See our approach for how projects are scoped and priced.
Belgium is three language regions, a bilingual capital, a sectoral pay system indexed to inflation, and a reward structure in which base salary is only part of the story. It is also home to a multilingual regulatory and public-affairs population that exists almost nowhere else. A map that treats it as one undifferentiated market will be wrong on language, wrong on pay and wrong on reachability.
A Belgian talent mapping project at Audentia follows the same eleven-step process we run everywhere, with the market-specific adjustments described in the next section built into the scope rather than discovered halfway through. In practice that means three things.
The target list is built, not borrowed. Most clients arrive with a list of the competitors they already know about. That list is the starting point, not the scope. In Belgium the additions are usually employers on the other side of the language border, which a Dutch-language or French-language brief silently excludes, and the international organisation sector in Brussels.
Profiles are normalised before anyone is compared. Titles are recorded as found and then normalised against actual scope, team size and reporting line, so that two people with the same title and very different jobs do not end up on the same line of a spreadsheet.
Reachability is assessed locally. A name on a map is only useful if you know what it would take to move them. We record notice position, tenure, pay structure and the local constraints that actually govern mobility in Belgium, rather than applying a generic availability assumption.
Full coverage of a defined Belgian market. Every relevant professional profiled consistently, so the output supports analysis rather than just outreach.
The size, structure, distribution, cost and accessibility of the market, rather than the individuals in it. Bought to test whether a plan is deliverable at all.
How Belgian competitors are staffed, structured and hiring, from publicly available sources and open primary research.
Senior leadership populations, with mobility assessed against local notice, reward structures and governance constraints.
The leadership layer and the emerging leaders beneath it, as an external benchmark against an internal succession slate.
Where in Belgium a function could credibly be built, at what cost, against which local competitors for the same people.
These are the things we build into a Belgian scope as standard, because each of them has changed a client's plan at least once. If a provider cannot talk about them, they are mapping Belgium from a template.
Belgium has three official languages, and the language of employment documents follows the region in which the establishment sits: Dutch in Flanders, French in Wallonia, German in the German-speaking community, with Brussels bilingual. Beyond the legal point, working language is a hard appointability filter for most commercial, HR and customer-facing roles. We record languages and proficiency per profile; a Belgian map without that field is not usable.
Belgian pay rises with inflation through sectoral indexation tied to the smoothed health index, so published salary data ages differently from other markets and a benchmark is only meaningful if it states its index date. Since 1 June 2026 a Programme Act has temporarily capped indexation on the portion of salary above €4,000 gross per month, paired with a new employer social security contribution. That bites hardest exactly where mapping usually operates — senior and specialist pay — so a Belgian benchmark written before June 2026 will overstate where those bands have since moved. We date every figure and state what has indexed since.
Sectoral joint committees (paritaire comités / commissions paritaires) establish minimum pay scales (barema) by function and seniority. As in the Netherlands, identifying the governing committee comes before any pay comparison. Two employers in what looks like the same industry can sit under different committees and therefore on different scales.
Company car and mobility budget, meal vouchers, hospitalisation and group insurance, and cafeteria plans form a large part of Belgian reward, and employer social charges are high. Comparing Belgian gross base against another market's gross base misreads both cost and competitiveness. Where a project scopes reward, we benchmark total package and name the components.
Belgium now runs three notice regimes side by side, and which one applies depends on when the person's contract started rather than on how long they have been there. Contracts that began between 1 January 2014 and 31 May 2026 follow the original table, which runs past 52 weeks at long seniority. Contracts beginning on or after 1 June 2026 are capped at 52 weeks from 17 years' seniority. Contracts beginning on or after 1 August 2026 are capped the same way and additionally cut to one week's notice throughout the first six months. Two people with identical seniority at the same employer can therefore carry materially different notice, and legacy pre-2014 white-collar arrangements can be longer again. There is no single Belgian notice period to plan against, so we assess reachability profile by profile and record the contract-start regime wherever it is determinable.
Works council and health-and-safety committee thresholds (100 and 50 employees respectively) and union delegation arrangements determine how restructures and new functions are handled. Where a map supports organisational change rather than a single hire, that sequence belongs in the plan.
The EU institutions, NATO and several thousand international associations, federations and representations have created a dense population of multilingual regulatory, public-affairs and policy professionals. It is a genuine competitive advantage for anyone hiring that profile — and a population that weighs mission, mandate and mobility at least as heavily as pay.
Research is conducted under the GDPR with the Belgian framework act, supervised by the Data Protection Authority, and the national collective agreement on recruitment and selection sets conduct standards for hiring processes. We use publicly available sources and open primary research only.
None of the above is legal, tax or immigration advice. It is the research context we work in, and the reason our scoping conversation asks questions that a generic brief does not. Where a decision turns on a point of Belgian law, tax or immigration, we will say so and recommend you take specialist advice on it.
Talent research is the discipline underneath everything else on this page. It is also a service in its own right, bought by teams that need verified data on a defined Belgian population and do not need the analysis, the map or the recommendations wrapped around it.
A talent research engagement delivers exactly what was specified: a defined population, researched to an agreed standard, recorded in agreed fields, verified, and handed over. No interpretation layer unless you ask for one.
Clients buy it for four reasons. Capacity: an in-house research or talent intelligence team that is good but oversubscribed. Reach: a Belgian market they cannot cover credibly from where they sit, in a language they do not work in. Independence: a population they need researched without a search firm's commercial interest attached to the answer. Verification: an existing dataset they suspect is stale, and want tested rather than replaced.
A search firm's research is a means to a placement, and the placement is where the money is. Ours is the product. That difference shows up in the places you would expect: we cover the whole market rather than the reachable part of it, we have no off-limits list protecting a client elsewhere, we tell you when the population is smaller than you hoped, and we hand over everything we found rather than the portion that supports a shortlist.
Also available as a standalone capability: see a sample research deliverable, or read how we scope and price research on our approach page.
Talent intelligence is what a map becomes when it stops being a one-off. It is the gathering, verification and analysis of data about a Belgian talent market — the people, competitors, skills, rewards and locations that shape it — maintained so that it is still true when the next decision arrives.
A map answers a question asked today. Talent intelligence answers the question a leadership team will ask next quarter, and the one after that, without commissioning a new project each time. The underlying research is the same; what changes is that it is structured for refresh, trended over time, and framed as decision support rather than as a dataset.
A large part of this market is sold as a platform: a dashboard, a data licence, and your team left to work out what it means. That works when you have an analyst to point at it. Most teams do not, and a dashboard nobody interprets is an expense rather than an asset.
We sell the analysis, not the access. There is no platform to log into, no seat licence and no renewal cliff — there is research, a view on what it means, and a conversation with the people who have to act on it. Where a platform genuinely is the better purchase for what you need, we will tell you that too.
Explore the service in depth on our talent intelligence page, or see the kind of analysis it produces in the complete talent market guide and skills that are getting scarce.
A talent intelligence consultancy is engaged to answer a question, not to supply a tool or a candidate. The work is: agree what decision is being made, define the market that bears on it, research that market to a standard that will survive challenge, and come back with what the evidence says — including when the evidence contradicts the brief.
That last part is the whole point, and it is the part a commission-funded provider cannot reliably do. When a search firm's income depends on the hire happening, “this population does not exist at the level you are planning for” is an expensive sentence to say. We are paid for the research whether the answer is encouraging or not, so the incentive problem does not arise.
In-house teams are usually capable and almost always oversubscribed. Comprehensive mapping needs sustained, systematic coverage over weeks, which is exactly the capacity a live requisition load consumes first. Bringing it in from outside also removes the internal-politics problem: an external population view is harder to dismiss as someone's agenda.
Our London and Paris offices cover the Benelux market, with Dutch-, French- and German-language research run by researchers who work in those languages. A researcher who does not work in the language of the market cannot read the local sources, cannot run open primary research credibly, and will systematically under-represent the employers that do not publish in English — which, in Belgium, is frequently where the capability sits.
We hold no off-limits list, because we make no placements. Every employer in your market is researchable, including the ones a search firm is contractually unable to touch. In a concentrated market that is not a nuance — it is the difference between a map and a partial map.
Research you do not own is research you have to buy again. Everything we produce is handed over permanently, in your format, with no retained copy sold onward and no ongoing licence. If we have done the job properly you will not need us again for that market for some time, and we would rather be recommended than renewed.
Talent sourcing is the part of this that works live roles. Where mapping describes a whole Belgian market, sourcing identifies, qualifies and engages the people who could fill the requisition in front of you now — and hands you a shortlist you can interview.
We run sourcing as an outsourced research and engagement function rather than as a contingency search. You keep the requisition, the process, the candidate relationship and the offer. We do the finding, the qualifying and the first conversation, and we charge a project fee or a day rate for it rather than a percentage of the salary.
That pricing matters more than it sounds. On a contingency model, the provider's incentive is the fastest acceptable hire; the candidates who need two conversations before they will consider a move are uneconomic to pursue. On a fee-for-work model they are not, which is why outsourced sourcing typically reaches further into the passive market than a contingency search does.
If you have a live role and need candidates, buy sourcing. If you have a plan and need to know whether it is deliverable, buy mapping. If you have several roles in the same market over the next year, map once and source from the map — it is cheaper than sourcing each role from scratch, and the map keeps working after the hiring stops.
More detail on our talent sourcing page. For populations you want warm before a role goes live, see talent pipelining below.
Recruitment support is the capacity layer: the research, administrative and out-of-hours work that sits around a hiring process and consumes a recruiter's week without being the part only a recruiter can do. We run it for in-house talent functions and for recruitment firms, in Belgian hours or around the clock.
Two quite different buyers purchase this. In-house talent acquisition teams buy it to get capacity without adding permanent headcount, usually because requisition load is spiky and hiring a researcher for the peak is not justifiable. Recruitment and search firms buy it as a white-label research and back-office engine, so their consultants spend their time on client and candidate relationships rather than on sourcing admin.
Both get the same thing: a defined scope of work, a fixed fee or day rate, and a team that works to your process and under your brand rather than inserting itself between you and your candidates.
Defined populations identified by name and employer so your recruiters start the day with a list rather than a search. Priced per project or per population.
Verified direct contact details for identified individuals, gathered from publicly available sources and handled under the applicable data protection regime.
First-pass screening against agreed criteria, with reasoning recorded, so your team interviews rather than filters.
Presentation-ready candidate documentation and clean, deduplicated, correctly-structured data going into your ATS instead of out of it.
Right-to-work, qualification, registration and reference administration kept audit-ready, including for regulated and clinical hiring.
Evening, weekend and public-holiday cover for live desks, so candidate responses are not sitting unanswered for sixteen hours.
High-volume clinical and locum sourcing, availability-chasing and booking support for healthcare recruitment desks.
Ad-hoc market, competitor and pay research to answer the question a client or hiring manager asked this morning.
Keeping an existing talent community accurate and warm, rather than letting it decay into a list of people who have moved.
Recruitment support is deliberately modular: take one service or several, for a defined period or ongoing. If what you actually need is a provider to own the whole process end to end, read the RPO section below — it explains plainly where we fit and where we do not.
Recruitment process outsourcing means handing all or part of a hiring process to an external provider. We supply the research and sourcing engine inside that process — for your in-house team or alongside an incumbent RPO provider — on a project fee rather than per hire. We are deliberately clear about which parts of RPO we do and which we do not.
We provide modular RPO support, not full-scope enterprise RPO. We run the research, sourcing, screening-support, pipelining, compliance and out-of-hours layers inside your hiring process. We do not take ownership of your requisitions, operate your ATS as the system owner, manage your hiring managers, make offers, or price per hire. If you need a single provider accountable for the end-to-end process under a multi-year per-hire contract, that is a full-scope RPO purchase — and we will tell you so rather than stretch our model to fit it.
Most RPO disappointment traces back to a mismatch at the point of purchase: an employer buys end-to-end accountability and gets a sourcing team, or buys sourcing capacity and gets a process-management layer it did not need. Because our model is modular and fee-for-work, you can buy the specific capability that is missing and keep the rest, which is usually both cheaper and easier to unwind.
Three patterns cover almost every engagement. Embedded research: a researcher or research team working to your process, your tooling and your brand for a defined period, charged as capacity rather than per hire. Project RPO support: a defined hiring programme — a new site, a new function, a volume intake — supported end to end on the research and sourcing side, at a fixed project fee. Behind an incumbent RPO: we supply the research and sourcing depth your existing provider is not resourced to deliver, usually in hard-to-fill or non-English markets, and they keep process ownership.
Per-hire pricing makes the provider's economics depend on the easy hires. The hard requisition — the one you actually needed help with — is the one that loses money, and it quietly goes to the bottom of the queue. On a fee-for-work model it does not, because we are paid for the work the role requires rather than for the hire being easy. It also means you can commission research that concludes a role is not fillable as specified, which on a per-hire model nobody has any reason to tell you.
Related: recruitment support services for individual modules, talent sourcing for live-role work, and the fee comparison calculator if you want to see what your current model is costing against a fixed-fee one.
Competitor talent mapping is structured research into how rival Belgian organisations are staffed: leadership, team structures, headcount distribution, capability concentrations and hiring activity. It is bought when you need to know not just who is out there, but how the companies you compete with are actually built.
It answers questions a job advert never will. Where is a competitor's capability genuinely deep, and where is it one person wide? How large is the team behind the function you are trying to build? Who have they hired in the last eighteen months, and from where? Which of their locations is growing, and which has stopped? And, most usefully: what does their structure imply about what they are about to do?
Publicly available sources and open primary research, always. Corporate filings and registers, regulatory disclosures, annual reports, published organisational information, professional profiles, published interviews and conference material, patent and publication records where relevant, and open conversations with people who are told who is asking and why.
We never use confidential internal information, never misrepresent who we are or why we are calling, and never approach anyone under a false pretext. If a piece of information can only be obtained that way, it does not go in the map. That is a constraint on what we can tell you, and we would rather have it than not.
Executive talent mapping is the research and profiling of senior leadership populations — C-suite, board, and the director and VP layer beneath — to establish who could credibly perform a specific senior role in Belgium, and how reachable any of them actually are.
At executive level, the second question is the hard one. A credible field is usually smaller than expected and almost always less available than it looks. Belgian seniority-based notice reaches many months for long-tenured executives, and legacy pre-2014 arrangements can extend it further, so reachability has to be assessed individual by individual.
A growing number of boards map first and decide afterwards. Mapping costs a fraction of a retained search, produces the entire field rather than a shortlist, involves no approach on behalf of a live role, and is entirely confidential. Sometimes it concludes that the internal candidate is genuinely the strongest option, which is a useful answer that a search process is structurally unlikely to reach.
See executive search and leadership research, and succession planning and the external bench for how this is used alongside an internal succession slate.
Talent pipelining is the natural continuation of a mapping project: the map identifies the population, and pipelining engages the relevant part of it and keeps it warm and current until you are ready to hire.
It exists because of a timing problem. The people you most want are rarely available in the quarter you need them, and the market's answer to that has traditionally been to wait, advertise and settle. Pipelining replaces waiting with maintained relationships: when the role goes live, the conversation is a continuation rather than a cold approach.
It is particularly effective in Belgium, where long notice periods mean a cold approach at the point of need is already months behind, and where scarce GMP and regulatory populations sit in a handful of employers.
More on the talent pipelining page.
Workforce intelligence analyses how workforces are composed, structured, distributed and skilled — yours and your competitors' — to inform workforce planning, organisational design and expansion decisions. Its unit of analysis is the workforce, not the vacancy.
Workforce planning runs on assumptions: that the people a plan needs exist, in the locations assumed, at the cost assumed, in the numbers assumed, and that they can be hired on the timeline assumed. Those assumptions are usually made once, early, by people with no external data, and then built into a budget. Workforce intelligence tests them before the budget is committed.
Related reading: skills that are getting scarce, the 2026 talent outlook and our research library.
Our process runs in eleven steps. The first four decide the value of everything after them.
We start with the decision, not the role. Sizing a Belgian market, planning a leadership hire, choosing a location, testing a headcount plan, benchmarking competitors — different objectives produce different maps of the same market.
The boundary is agreed explicitly and documented before research begins: functions, seniority bands, sectors, Belgian regions, working languages, and which adjacent pools are in or out. Scope becomes a shared decision rather than a later disagreement.
We build the target list from the market definition, then test it. Every list starts incomplete, and in Belgium the organisations added during research — mid-market employers, suppliers, institutes — are frequently the most valuable.
What actually qualifies someone for inclusion — scope, experience markers, evidenced capability, language — expressed precisely enough that two researchers would make the same call.
Systematic, organisation-by-organisation coverage by researchers who specialise in that function and work in the language of the market, using publicly available sources and open primary research.
Individuals identified against the agreed criteria, with completeness against scope as the objective rather than volume.
Every profile checked; titles normalised against actual scope; career history, structural position, language and capability signals recorded consistently. Anything unconfirmed is flagged as unconfirmed.
Density by employer and location, movement patterns, structural comparison, and an availability assessment that reflects Belgian notice periods, pay structures and local constraints rather than a generic assumption.
Data organised into the agreed segmentation — ready-now, developmental, watch-list, unlikely to move — so the output is analysable rather than a flat list.
What the data actually shows: where the depth is, where the plan is exposed, which organisations to target, who is genuinely reachable, and what the map says that the original assumption did not.
A briefing with the people making the decision, plus the complete dataset and analysis handed over permanently — yours, in your format, with no ongoing dependency on us.
Book a 30-minute discovery callWe will tell you honestly whether mapping is the right tool for your decision.
Talk to Audentia About Talent MappingThe table below shows the data points in a standard Audentia talent map for Belgium. All of it is researched from publicly available sources and open primary research.
| Information | What it shows | How it can be used |
|---|---|---|
| Name | A specific, relevant professional in the defined market | Turns an abstract market into people you can actually approach |
| Current employer | Where they work today | Reveals which Belgian organisations hold the capability |
| Current role | Their position, normalised against real scope | Makes people comparable across differently-titled employers |
| Function | The discipline they work in | Enables function-level supply analysis |
| Seniority | Their level and position in the hierarchy | Establishes whether the population is genuinely appointable to your role |
| Location | City, region and realistic commutable or hybrid catchment | Underpins location strategy and relocation assumptions |
| Working languages | Languages they work in, and at what level | The sharpest appointability filter in the Belgian market, and a legal consideration |
| Tenure | Time in role and with the employer | The strongest single indicator of likely mobility |
| Career history | Previous organisations and progression | Reveals the routes people take into these roles |
| Skills | Technical and functional capability evidenced in the public record | Tests whether the specific skill set exists at the volume assumed |
| Industry experience | Sectors worked in | Identifies transferable pools beyond the obvious competitor set |
| Reporting line | Who they report to and who reports to them | Shows what they actually run, not what their title implies |
| Organisational position | Where they sit in the structure around them | Distinguishes a genuine functional head from a senior individual contributor |
| Notice position (where determinable) | The contractual and statutory notice that applies to them | Seniority-based notice can run to many months, so it has to be assessed per person |
| Reward information (where scoped) | Researched pay and total reward context for the band, on a stated basis | Benchmarked as total package, with the extra-legal components named and the index date stated |
| Talent pool category | Ready-now, developmental, watch-list, unlikely to move | Turns the map into a prioritised action list |
Contact details for mapped individuals can be gathered as a separate step through our number gathering service, handled under the applicable data protection regime. Where a project also scopes workforce composition or diversity benchmarking of the mapped population, see diversity hiring.
Six of the eight rows below are services we provide. Two are not, and they are in the table because the fastest way to buy the wrong thing is to not know which row you are in. If your need is one of the last two, we will say so.
| Service | Starts from | Covers | You end up with | Typically priced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Talent mapping | A business question about a market | The whole defined population, available or not | A researched dataset and analysis you own permanently | Fixed project fee |
| Talent research | A specification for data | A defined population, researched to your fields | Verified structured data, no interpretation layer unless asked | Fixed project fee or day rate |
| Talent intelligence | A recurring decision need | A market, maintained and trended over time | Analysis and decision support, refreshed on a cadence | Project fee or retained programme |
| Talent sourcing | A live requisition | The people who could fill that role now | A qualified shortlist, plus every record from the search | Project fee or day rate |
| Recruitment support | A capacity or admin gap | Whatever the agreed module covers | Completed work inside your process, under your brand | Fixed fee, day rate or retained capacity |
| RPO support | A hiring programme needing a research engine | Your requisition flow, on the research and sourcing side | Embedded research and sourcing capability; you keep process ownership | Project fee or retained capacity |
| Full-scope RPO (not us) | End-to-end process accountability | The entire hiring process, including management of it | A provider owning the process and the outcome | Typically per hire or per month, multi-year |
| Executive search (not us) | One senior appointment | A shortlist for that appointment | An appointed executive | Retained or contingency placement fee |
The common mistake is buying execution when the question was strategic. If you do not yet know whether the population exists, a search or an RPO contract will not tell you — it will spend six months discovering it on your behalf. Map first; it is cheaper, faster and reversible.
A national average usually hides the finding that matters. These are the Belgian markets we are asked about most, and what distinguishes each one as a talent market rather than as an economy.
| Region | Industry concentration | What it means for hiring |
|---|---|---|
| Brussels-Capital Region | EU institutions, public affairs and regulatory, international organisations, finance, professional services | The multilingual regulatory and policy population; bilingual by default, often trilingual in practice |
| Antwerp | Chemicals and petrochemicals, port and maritime logistics, diamonds, fashion retail | Industrial and operational leadership at scale; competes with Rotterdam for the same population |
| Ghent and East Flanders | Biotechnology, automotive assembly, cleantech, food, textiles | Strong biotech research base alongside large-scale manufacturing; Dutch-language market |
| Leuven and Flemish Brabant | Semiconductors and nanoelectronics, life sciences, deep tech, software | Research-anchored and internationally recruited; one of Europe's densest deep-tech clusters for its size |
| Liège and the Meuse corridor | Logistics and air cargo, aerospace, biomanufacturing, metals | French-language market; industrial transition from heavy industry into life sciences and logistics |
| Charleroi and Wallonia | Biopharmaceutical manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, digital | The Walloon biopharma corridor holds genuinely scarce GMP and quality populations |
| Hasselt and Limburg | Logistics, manufacturing, health technology, cleantech | Lower cost, commutable to both the Randstad and the Rhine-Ruhr for some roles |
Our London and Paris offices cover the Benelux market, with Dutch-, French- and German-language research run by researchers who work in those languages. Projects frequently extend beyond Belgium where the relevant population does — see the UK, the USA and the UAE, or ask about any of the seventy-plus markets we research.
Research is run by people who specialise in the function and the sector, because a researcher who does not understand what the role actually does cannot tell a genuine match from a matching job title. These are the Belgian sectors we are commissioned in most often.
Not listed? We research across more than seventy markets and the full sector list is on our sectors page. Where we have not covered a specific niche before, we say so at scoping rather than after invoicing.
An illustrative project, composited from engagements of this type rather than describing a single named client. It is here because the pattern — the research changing the plan rather than confirming it — is the normal outcome.
A biopharmaceutical manufacturer scaling a new facility needed to know whether the GMP quality and qualified-person capability it required existed in Belgium, and what it would take to reach it, before it signed off a hiring plan.
GMP quality assurance and control leadership, qualified persons and sterile manufacturing leadership across biopharma, pharma and CDMO employers in Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels, with Leiden and Basel as comparison markets
Biopharma manufacturers, contract development and manufacturing organisations, fill-finish specialists, regulators and the consultancies and auditors serving the sector
Individuals recorded by employer, site, GMP scope, product modality, qualified-person status and registration, working languages and proficiency, governing joint committee where determinable, seniority and notice position
The qualified-person population was far smaller than the plan assumed and almost entirely concentrated in six employers along the Walloon corridor, with notice periods on the long-tenured segment running past six months. Language was the sharper constraint: a third of the credible population worked only in French, which ruled them out of a role the client had scoped as Dutch-speaking without having tested whether it needed to be
The client rescoped the role's language requirement after the research showed it was not operationally necessary, which roughly doubled the addressable population. It also moved the qualified-person appointment to the front of the hiring sequence because of notice, and briefed a pipelining engagement on the six-employer population rather than running an open search
Real, named engagements are on our case studies page, and a redacted deliverable is at sample talent sourcing analysis.
Every project is scoped individually, so the deliverable list is agreed in the proposal. This is what it normally contains.
The complete researched dataset, segmented as agreed, in your format — normally a spreadsheet or whatever your systems take. Every profile carries the fields agreed at scoping, and anything unconfirmed is marked as unconfirmed rather than presented as fact.
A written analysis of what the data shows: population size and depth, concentration by employer and location, structural patterns, movement, scarcity, and the specific points where the plan is exposed.
How the organisations in scope are actually built — team sizes, reporting lines, where capability is concentrated and where it is thin — researched from publicly available sources and open primary research.
Total package benchmarking with the extra-legal components named individually, read against the governing joint committee scale where determinable, and every figure dated against indexation.
What we would do with this if it were our plan: which organisations to target, in what order, with what approach, and which parts of the plan to change before committing to them.
A working session with the people making the decision rather than a report dropped into an inbox. The questions that come up in that session are usually the most valuable part of the project.
Every record, benchmark and insight is yours, permanently. Nothing is retained in a proprietary database, and you can hire from the map as many times as you like at no further cost.
We charge a fixed project fee for the research. No commission, no percentage of salary, no placement fee. That means we have no financial interest in who you hire, or whether you hire at all — so when the research says your plan will not work in Belgium, we can simply tell you.
We place nobody, so we owe nobody protection. No part of your Belgian market is closed to us because of a client relationship elsewhere. A search firm cannot say that, and in a market as concentrated as the Walloon biopharma corridor it changes what the research can actually cover.
Every record, contact, benchmark and insight is handed over and stays yours permanently. Nothing is held back in a proprietary database to be sold to your competitor next quarter, and you can hire from the map repeatedly at no additional cost.
Our London and Paris offices cover the Benelux market, with Dutch-, French- and German-language research run by researchers who work in those languages.
Titles normalised against actual scope, structures tested rather than assumed, and anything unconfirmed labelled as unconfirmed. The value of a map is entirely a function of whether you can trust the records in it.
We have run research across more than seventy markets, and we work in Belgium often enough to know where the published data is wrong. Where we have not covered a specific niche before, we say so at scoping rather than after invoicing.
More on who we are, the team, how we work and what clients say.
The questions Belgian clients ask most often, including the ones about pricing and about what we will not do.
Talent mapping is the structured research process of identifying and profiling the people who could fill a defined set of roles in a defined market, before a vacancy exists. It records who they are, where they work, their function, seniority, location, languages and tenure, and how the organisations around them are structured, so hiring decisions are made on evidence rather than on whoever applies.
Talent mapping services in Belgium are research engagements in which a specialist provider maps a defined Belgian talent market for a client. A typical project covers market definition, target organisation identification, population research, competitor structure analysis, reward benchmarking where scoped, and written analysis, delivered as a structured dataset with recommendations and handed over permanently.
Talent research is the verified, structured gathering of data on defined talent populations to a client's specification. It covers market and company research, individual identification, leadership and structural research, verification and reporting. It is the discipline underneath both talent mapping and talent intelligence, and it can also be bought on its own as a research capability.
Talent intelligence is the gathering, verification and analysis of data about a talent market — the people, competitors, skills, rewards and locations that shape it — turned into insight a leadership team can act on. Unlike a one-off map, it is designed to stay current and to be refreshed on an agreed cadence.
Talent sourcing is the identification, qualification and engagement of candidates for roles that are live now. It starts from a requisition rather than from a business question, and it ends when the shortlist is delivered. Mapping describes a whole market; sourcing works a specific role within it. We do both, and we charge a project or day-rate fee for either rather than a placement commission.
We provide RPO support rather than full-scope RPO. We run the research, sourcing and support layers inside your hiring process — market mapping, name generation, longlisting, contact discovery, screening support, pipelining, out-of-hours cover and compliance support — either behind your in-house talent acquisition team or alongside an incumbent RPO provider. What we do not do is take ownership of your requisitions, run your ATS, make offers or price per hire. If you need a provider to own the end-to-end process under a per-hire contract, a full-scope RPO is the right purchase and we will say so.
Recruitment support is the set of services that sit around a hiring process rather than replacing it: research and name generation, contact discovery, candidate screening support, CV formatting and data cleaning, compliance and credentialing support, and out-of-hours desk cover. It is bought both by in-house talent functions wanting capacity and by recruitment firms wanting a research and back-office engine without adding headcount.
A project defines the business objective, agrees the market boundary, identifies and tests target organisations, defines talent criteria, researches the market systematically, verifies and enriches every profile, analyses the landscape, builds the segmented map, translates the research into insight, and delivers it with a briefing. Audentia Research runs this as an eleven-step process under a fixed project fee.
Recruitment responds to a vacancy and ends when the role is filled. Talent mapping starts from a business question, covers the entire defined market whether or not those people are available now, and produces an asset that keeps its value long after the first hire. One is execution; the other is the evidence that should precede it.
Executive search is a process to appoint one senior person, usually ending in a placement fee. Executive talent mapping researches the whole credible field without any appointment being made and without approaching anyone on behalf of a live role. Many organisations map first, then decide whether a search is needed at all.
CEOs, CHROs and Chief People Officers, HR Directors, Talent Acquisition Directors and Heads of Talent, workforce planning and strategy teams, executive search and recruitment firms, private equity and venture capital investors, and companies entering or expanding in Belgium.
When a decision is about to be made that would be expensive to reverse: entering Belgium, opening a site, building a new function, hiring executives, planning succession, benchmarking competitors, planning workforce or headcount, or preparing for hiring you already know will be hard.
Most projects run three to eight weeks, depending on the size of the market, the number of target organisations, the seniority of the population and the number of geographies and languages involved. A focused scan can be faster; multi-function or multi-country projects take longer. Timelines are agreed in the proposal before work begins.
Audentia Research prices every project as a fixed fee based on scope: the size of the market, the number of target organisations, the depth of research and the deliverables agreed. There is no commission and no percentage of salary, and the fee is set out in the proposal before work starts. Because scope drives the fee, a specific figure requires a short conversation about what is actually needed.
Yes, entirely. Every record, contact, benchmark and insight belongs to the client and stays with them permanently. Nothing is retained in a proprietary database, and additional hires can be made from the map at no extra cost.
Not a physical office. Our London and Paris offices cover the Benelux market, with Dutch-, French- and German-language research run by researchers who work in those languages. Our offices are in London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai, and we state research coverage across more than seventy markets. We would rather be straight about that than claim a local presence we do not have — what matters for research quality is language capability, market knowledge and time-zone overlap, and those we do have.
Start with a thirty-minute discovery call to talk through the decision behind the request, the market involved and the timeline. Audentia Research then issues a bespoke proposal with a defined scope, deliverables and a transparent fixed fee. If mapping is not the right tool for your decision, we will say so on that call.
Yes. Language is both a legal matter — employment documents follow the language of the region — and the sharpest practical filter on who is actually appointable. We record languages and proficiency per profile. In our experience it is also the field most likely to change a client's mind, because scoped language requirements are often stricter than the role genuinely needs.
It means Belgian pay data has a shelf life. Because pay rises with inflation through sectoral indexation rather than only at review points, a benchmark without an index date cannot be read reliably. Every figure we report is dated, and we state what has indexed since the research was carried out.
Because company car and mobility budget, meal vouchers, hospitalisation and group insurance and cafeteria plans form a large share of Belgian reward, and employer social charges are high. A gross-to-gross comparison against the UK, Germany or the US will misread both cost and competitiveness, usually in the direction that makes an uncompetitive offer look fine.
Yes, and for that population it is the right framing. The EU institutions, NATO and the international association sector have created a multilingual regulatory and policy market that functions independently of the Belgian domestic economy. We scope it as its own market, with nationality mix, institutional background, languages and mandate recorded as the fields that actually predict fit.
Often, and for some functions it should be. The Antwerp–Rotterdam port corridor and the Leuven–Eindhoven–Aachen technology triangle are genuine cross-border markets. We agree the boundary on evidence rather than on national borders, and record language and cross-border mobility explicitly, because the geography suggests more movement than actually happens.
More questions and answers on our FAQ hub.
The statutory and statistical sources behind this page, with the authority that publishes each one. Checked 19 October 2026.
Employment law, pay thresholds and immigration rules change, sometimes mid-year and sometimes retrospectively. Three rules govern how we use them.
Spotted something out of date? Tell us at sales@audentiaresearch.com and we will check it and correct the page. We would rather be corrected than cited wrongly.
Every market has its own notice conventions, pay structures, data protection regime and language requirements, and every one of them changes what a usable map has to record. These are the markets with a dedicated page; we research more than seventy.
London, the regions, and a market where notice periods and deferred compensation set the timeline.
View the market →Fifty state markets, pay transparency law, and metro-level cost variation that national averages hide.
View the market →Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the wider GCC, where nationalisation policy and expatriate mobility shape every map.
View the market →Works councils, collective agreement grades and a Mittelstand that holds most of the engineering capability.
View the market →CAO pay scales, the highest part-time rate in the EU, and a high-tech cluster concentrated in one region.
View the market →Three language regions, automatic wage indexation, and an EU public-affairs pool that exists nowhere else.
You are hereNear-universal collective agreements, fourteen-payment salaries, and Vienna's CEE headquarters layer.
View the market →Five capital-city markets, three time zones, award classifications and superannuation on top of base.
View the market →A thirty-minute conversation is usually enough to establish whether talent mapping, talent research, sourcing or RPO support is the right tool for the decision in front of you, and what the right scope would be. If none of them is, we will tell you.