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Our Journey
t all started in Groningen, a city famous for its bicycles, lively pubs, and thousands of students. Two friends, Daan (who studied Business) and Thomas (who studied IT), were sitting in their messy student house on the Vismarkt, sharing a pizza and talking about the future.
Thomas was frustrated. He was about to graduate, and his phone was constantly ringing with calls from recruiters. But there was a problem: the recruiters didn’t understand anything about his field. They kept offering him jobs that didn’t match his programming skills, mixing up basic terms, and treating him like just another resume.
Daan, listening to his friend, saw a clear opportunity. “Companies are desperate for IT talent,” he said, “but the people trying to connect them don’t actually understand IT. Why don’t we do it ourselves?”
They didn’t write a massive business plan or search for big investors. They just started doing it. They called their project Testing yAg—a nod to their young, ambitious energy in Groningen.
Their first “office” was their shared living room table, right next to the empty coffee cups. Their strategy was incredibly simple: Thomas knew exactly who the most talented and hardworking IT students at the university were, and Daan simply picked up the phone and started calling local tech companies in the northern Netherlands.
Because Thomas actually knew how to code, they could genuinely talk to candidates about their skills and passions. They weren’t just reading keywords off a paper; they understood what the developers actually wanted to do. And companies immediately noticed the difference. When Testing yAg sent them a candidate, it was always a perfect match. No nonsense, no wasted time.
What started as a smart idea between two friends to help their classmates find cool jobs quickly snowballed. Before they even got their diplomas, their student side-hustle had grown into a real, functioning business. They eventually traded their living room table for a real office, but they never lost that practical, no-nonsense Groningen mentality.
Today, Testing yAg is a successful IT recruitment agency. But at its core, it’s still built on the exact same simple principle Daan and Thomas discovered back in their student days: recruitment works best when you actually understand the people and the technology you are working with.