Exordium: Finland’s readiness to recruit international workforce - Part 1

In the end of 2021, I was applying to participate in a programme “Talent Traction: Co-creating multicultural workplace”, organised by TE-services and Tampere University of Applied Sciences for Pirkanmaa region. While preparing, I researched the labour market and its particularities in Finland. It resulted in me writing this Exordium.

This is the first part, in which I discuss the general topic of labour market in Finland in terms of recruitment of internationals.

There is a multitude of government programmes, Talent Boost1 being the most known, that are well intended to help advance the goals of immigrant employment in Finland. Majority of them, however, are directed at immigrants, rather than Finnish companies, when they are the ones that might need rethinking their organisational operations, processes, culture, if they are to make the change and become inclusive.

Some companies are considering hiring internationals, whether already residing in Finland, or trying to recruit them from abroad. It might be beneficial for these businesses to identify any deficiencies in recruitment strategies, working environment, or in general company culture and practices, to define a long-term action plan to create truly multicultural workplaces.

However, all such planning, execution, and investment into operational capabilities to function as a multicultural workplace is all in vain, if no immigrant overcomes the recruitment process and is offered a position.

It has been well established there exists biases and outright de facto discrimination in the Finnish labour market recruitment activities. Even Finnish nationals with non-ethnonationalistic names, such as Russian2 or Roma3, are facing inexcusable obstacles to secure job interviews and by causality to ultimately obtain employment. Thus by logical extension, immigrants face even greater burden to find work in Finland.

This is not to claim that there is widespread systematic and active xenophobia in the recruitment culture of Finland. However, there is plenty of circumstantial data to draw the conclusion that immigrant workers are at disadvantage to secure even a job interview.

Job seeking/recruitment is complicated for both parties involved, and that is true everywhere, not only in Finland. For companies to recruit any talent, their general recruitment processes and practices have to be solid in the first place, and only then adjustments can be made to expand recruitment to internationals.

Therefore I will be looking into the following topics, where the first two pertain to general problems in recruitment, and the final one concentrates on immigrant employment in particular:

• Bad recruitment practices, hubris and general biases
• Unreasonable requirements and expectations
• Biases towards an immigrant as a job seeker.

In the upcoming parts, I will elaborate on these topics and how they put job seekers at a disadvantage, especially when it comes to internationals.

Edit. Continue reading: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

1Talent Boost programme. Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland. https://tem.fi/en/talent-boost-en

2Larja, L., Warius, J., Sundb?ck, L., Liebkind, K., Kandolin, I., Jasinkaja-Lahti, I. Discrimination in the Finnish Labor Market. An overview and a Field Experiment on Recruitment. Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy. 2012. p. 179.

3Nelj? nimek?st? yritt?j?? haki ty?t? romaninimill?, yht?k??n ei kutsuttu ty?haastatteluun – "Ty?el?m? ei ole yhdenvertainen romaneille tai muille v?hemmist?ille". Yle uutiset. 2018-10-31. https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10485225