More foreigners to Finnish workforce - it's up to you
Ville Vesterinen wrote about the need to re-evaluate Finland's immigration policy to create some real carrots to get foreign workers to come to Finland. He referred to Joi Ito's post about IT eventually equalizing GDP per capita in the future. The workforce issue has been touched lately in the gaming industry news as well, as Neogames published their report on the Finnish game industry's educational needs.
I think SMEs can do a lot themselves as well to get foreigners excited about working here. First of all, there is a whole bunch of good foreign students out there, many of whom are eager to work and show their skills if only given the chance. Of course hiring students is also pretty cost efficient. Second, if you happen to build a reputation good enough to lure some professional from abroad to Finland, the chances are she will draw in also other fellow countrywomen over time. I've seen that happen, in a somewhat large scale even. That's really valuable when the available professionals in Finland are as limited as today. Often they also bring their spouses along who may be skilled in some other area, so other organizations may benefit as well.
In my opinion it's also very good to strive to get foreigners along in the startups early on. It's quite tricky a task to try to build a truly global product or service if you only have people from a single continent, let alone from one country. In some cases you can surely offset this by having beta users, but sometimes you just want the insight in-house, along with the respective networks you can tap into. Also, the sooner you (really need to) start using English as the true company language, the easier it gets to get other nationalities along, and the lighter it makes the document translation burden later on.
Official policies are little use if the companies themselves don't take on the opportunity. So, do yourselves and Finland a favor and hire foreigners! That's my 2 cents.
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*Thumbs up* Nice said Miikka. If only English is used in all paperwork in Finland, that would make a much better international business environment.
I've got one word for you that will end a lot of the long-term immigration dreams to Finland: climate.
Well I don't think the climate is a determining factor in immigration. Sure, for some it might be a huge issue, but for example at Digital Chocolate we have people from Brazil, Chile, Spain, Australia...heck, there's even one girl from Florida who said she prefers the climate here to the one over there. :)
And then again, it's not that everybody working in Finland would need to stay here for good either.
Individual anecdotes don't help. I also know foreigners who've moved here for e.g. the nature, not bothered by the climate - not enough to stay away anyway.
Unfortunately, no matter how great we may think Finland is, the fact is that Finland does not enjoy a great reputation among the potential immigration candidates. I mean here there are talks of getting 100,000 foreign workers here in a relatively short time period. It's the "how" part that's missing - with what marketing? With what reputation?
It's no coincidence that in the expat-community in Finland, the question as to why someone is here is formulated as "Love or Nokia?".
Frankly, I doubt we we enough hot single women to rely on them as the primary source of immigrants ;P
Miikka, you have hit the nail on the head when urging SMEs to hire foreigners.
Of course there are lots of advantages to hiring a fellow Finn in the short run:
- No need to compare level of education with foreign degrees
- No need to change to English (Finns hesitate to use English citing lack of fluency when in my experience they are quite good at it, perhaps just a lack of practice)
- Supporting the local labour market (a good reason)
But here are a few things that adding a few foreigners to your company might bring about:
- Unless your business is targeted strictly to the local market, working with people from various cultures gives a better insight into those communities.
- Look upon foreigners as a conduit to expand your business beyond your boundaries; when they decide to leave Finland you now have a trusted contact in another country.
.. and in case someone is delusional and thinks that Finland IS actually being marketed in a good way, check out this video via my whine about it and think again:
http://www.groundswell.fi/sim/2008/04/28/this-is-how-we-get-100000-immigrant-workers/
Sami, you're totally right the marketing of Finland should be improved a lot. And getting 100k+ immigrants would certainly require some branding silver bullet...
My point was mainly that even if you had a great brand and "good" climate (whatever that is), it's little use getting the foreigners here if no one hires them (this would be the grassroots approach I guess). There are a bit too many stories of well-educated foreigners not landing even interviews - even if they spoke excellent Finnish.
In the ICT sector and among the younger generation I hope things are looked at differently in general, but in the economy/society as a whole a lot needs to change to really support that amount of new immigrants (maybe it's forced by the circumstances soon). Otherwise the spouses of the main hires will not find (get) a job, and it doesn't take too long for your new hire to relocate with his/her family once again.
Indeed, it's true that even if we got 100,000 immigrants, they're of no use if they're all on our unemployment benefits ;)
I agree the ICT sector is more "enlightened" in this respect - already 10 years ago I worked for a company in Helsinki that had over 10 nationalities in a group of less than 50 people.
The root cause for not hiring enough foreigners is probably, unfortunately, xenophobia at some conscious or unconscious level.
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