Hello reader! You are reading a blog about HR written by Heli Toivonen. If you are interested in stuff such as recruitment, employer branding, social media and HR technology with focus on Finland, just keep on reading..
In spite of the Christmas Peace, which will be declared in Turku, Finland tomorrow, the war for talent continues. Recruiting and retaining talented employees has become more and more competitive in the past years, and companies need to come up with new strategies how to survive and win this war. According to a study of McKinsey & Co, the most important company resource in the coming years willl be talent. Talents want to have great jobs in great companies with great values, great culture and great management, not forgetting great salary and great location.
I have been fighting in the war for talent when I recruited technical staff (researchers, engineers, technical sales and marketing people) for multinational engineering and chemical companies in Central Europe. Even with the help of well-known recruitment consultants and headhunters, it was extremely difficult to find the right people for the open positions. We did a lot in terms of employer branding and new recruitment strategies but there were simply too many other companies out in the market offering better salaries, more attractive locations etc.
The war for talent has also hit Finland if you believe the Finnish media and the authorities (see e.g Taloussanomat ). The Finnish labor force is shrinking, and until 2013 there will be more employees retiring from the job market than employees replacing them. The gap needs to be filled with foreign employees who will be imported en masse from different parts of the world. We need more talented researchers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and so on in order to stay competitive.
I have recently moved back to Finland and I have not seen a sign of war for talent yet. Of course the economic downturn has influenced the supply and demand in the job market but I could not believe that people with academic degree, several years of working experience, international background, business mindset, excellent language and social skills have it so hard to find proper jobs here. One dark November evening I met 4 foreigners who had voluntarily moved to Finland and all of them had been searching for a job for months. Three of them came from Western Europe and one from India, and their backgrounds varied from mathematics to law and business. It was frustrating to hear their stories how badly they had been treated in the application processes and how most of them had planned to start searching employment elsewhere where companies and people are more open-minded. Friends of them had already given up and left the country.
What I want to say with this posting is that firstly, many of the Finnish companies have apparently not heard from the war for talent yet or if they have, they have not understood the importance of it. Secondly, as long as the attitudes towards foreign employees are so narrow-minded there is no need to start recruiting more people from abroad. Thirdly, it would be wiser to utilize the resources that are already available here rather than start attracting new people to Finland. And believe me, attracting foreign talents to Finland is not going to be a piece of cake. For most of the foreigners who move to Finland, the motivation to come here is definitely not the weather and not the location but the Finnish girls with whom they fall in love. And hopefully in the future also an irresistible job offer from a Finnish company, which has understood the importance of the war for talent!
