My Oulu: Passing up on skilled immigrant workers may be detrimental to Finnish businesses

Dilina Perera is a Sri Lankan student, who has completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in his home country in Business Management. After over 11 years of experience in industry, Perera decided to come to the University of Oulu in 2023 to join the Industrial Engineering and Management Master’s programme to continue his academic studies. For his thesis, he is looking into the employer perception on skilled immigrant recruitment.

“There has been research into the employer side and the job seeker side of the equation, but I noticed a lack of research interest into assessing employer perception related to highly skilled immigrants. I set out to identify how Finnish employers perceive the possibility of recruiting highly skilled immigrants to their organisation and their willingness to open up vacancies to this group”, Perera explains.

Competent employees is a top priority

Perera is focusing on five industries: ICT, manufacturing, education, consultancy and engineering. He is using a threats/benefits model and stereotype content model to investigate the issue and focusing on several elements in his work. The employers included in his thesis are small and medium-sized enterprises, businesses that may or may not have had international employees. The size of the companies in Perera’s research means that their concerns are more narrowly defined than those of large multinationals.

“Things like diversity or corporate image as an equal opportunity employer are not yet their top priorities. SMEs have more practical concerns, and the most important of those is a human supply issue in the market. They need more skilled workers than what is available in the job market currently and the specific skill gaps cannot be fulfilled by native workers only”, Perera says.

While the need for competent workers is a top priority to small and medium-sized businesses, other perceived benefits of hiring skilled immigrants include getting access to global markets, showcasing them as an international company and driving innovation. Having a native speaker of a South Asian language as a worker means that communicating in that market is that much simpler.

Perera says that the number of highly educated workers among all immigrant work seekers is high in Northern Ostrobothnia, 61 per cent. These are people with university degrees and experience in their respective industries. Still, international recruiting has not significantly grown in the past years, and in Finland the filling rate is low for jobs: out of 93,700 jobs only 8,800 were filled according to the employment bulletin from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland in May 2024.

Perceived risks

There is a disconnect between the need and the supply, which Perera boils down to a few issues.

“First of all, hiring anyone is a risk, especially for a small and medium-sized business. Regardless of nationality, the compatibility of an employee is always a concern to any organisation, and vice versa. However, there are a few specific things when talking about hiring immigrants,” Perera says.

Based on Perera’s interviews, things like the lack of Finnish language proficiency or challenges in verifying the qualifications of immigrants like academic degrees or professional competence came up on the “threats” side of the model. And, in some industry verticals such as education, Finnish competency is more required than in others, like ICT for instance.

Other perceived threats like potential discomfort in working with people from other cultures or excluding native workers by hiring international workers were not significantly represented in the results, says Perera.

“The companies said firmly that they don’t see the increasing rate of immigrant job seekers as a threat to native workers because it gives more options for local employers. Likewise, most said that their recruitment process is the same for native and immigrant job seekers, and that they don’t stereotype personality attributes and competencies based on ethnicities.”

With experience comes confidence

Perera says that there is also a practical reason why there is still a high threshold to recruit immigrants, and this can be tackled with an equally practical solution.

“There is simply a lack of experience in many businesses when it comes to having international hires. When businesses have had immigrant workers before, it correlates directly to seeing many benefits and little to no threats in hiring international workers. Businesses immediately become more confident in hiring immigrants. A trainee system would help tremendously in this regard, a low-risk trial system where both parties can see how compatible they are”, Perera muses.

If the obstacles to skilled immigrants’ chances of being employed in Finland remain in place, it will have serious consequences to the job market, says Perera.