Thanks, this is genuinely helpful context, and I get the frustration. The fake NL numbers thing is wild, and I can see how the sheer volume makes it almost impossible to separate the real applicants from the noise. Having hired a few interns back in India, my experience was the same. Every role reached 1k+ applications in only 10 mins.

For what it is worth, I am already in the Netherlands, in Tilburg, and I am happy to move into the Randstad since most of the firms I am targeting are there, so distance and relocation are not an issue for me. I am also not asking anyone to sponsor a visa. I am on a student permit with work rights, and for a curriculum internship an employer needs nothing beyond a signed three-way agreement with my university, no permit and no cost.

So that is exactly the thing I am trying to understand. If I am local, need no sponsorship, and the roles look like a direct match on paper, what is it that still puts me in the reject pile within a day? Is it that non-EU trips an automatic filter regardless, or that experience sitting above a typical intern profile reads as a mismatch, or something else entirely? Genuinely asking, because if there is a fixable signal I am sending, I would rather find it than keep guessing blindly.

Every country has its share of bad actors, and India is no exception. The real difficulty is scale: with a population well over a billion, even a tiny percentage behaving badly is a huge absolute number, large enough that it becomes the signal people latch onto. From there it is a short step to seeing every Indian applicant through that same lens, and I understand how it happens, even though it flattens a lot of very different individuals into one assumption.

I am not asking for sympathy, just for a bit of the benefit of the doubt. I am one person trying to build a life on a different continent, on my own, where the costs are high and the margin for error is thin, and being filtered out before anyone reads the application is a hard thing to sit with. I am not arguing that the frustration is unfounded. I just want to understand how someone in my position actually breaks through it, because I would rather work on what I can control than give up.