I’m an immigrant in Finland. I built and sold a company here, and hired 50 people along the way. 19 of them weren’t Finnish.
They’ve been some of the most driven, ambitious and hardworking people I’ve ever worked with.
We never set out to hire foreigners. We just hired the best person for each job. Almost half the time, that person wasn’t Finnish.
Meanwhile, a job applicant with a foreign name in Finland has to send up to 2.5x as many applications to get an interview. That’s killing our competitiveness as a country.
They say Finland is short on talent to compete globally. I call bs. The talent is already here. It just gets filtered out at the CV stage, based on a name.
If you hire, start here:
- Remove names from CVs in the first screening round. Unconscious bias is real.
- Don’t require Finnish for roles that work in English. Seriously.
- Hire the best person for the job, whatever their name looks like.