A search in allabolag.se (“Search service for Swedish companies”) with “Rekrytering” (Swedish word for “Recruiting”) and “Stockholm” gives 1225 results. One of the most common questions I receive from the expat community is this,
“With so many recruitment firms in Stockholm, why am I still struggling to find a job?”
The answer to this very question gives us the gap in which foreign talents fall off. Lets break the recruitment process into its three primitive segments:
- Talent acquisition -> acquiring/ finding relevant talents
- Validation -> analyse, test and examine the skills & personality of the talent
- Hiring -> Agreeing on the conditions and offer to sign the contract
Obviously every company that is recruiting, invest a considerable effort in talent acquisition since thats what they are after.
But how does international talents get missed out of this talent search?
Well, the answer to that question lies in the second phase of the recruitment process -> Validation.
There’s no surprise here really. Most of the validation happen over a stringent interview process with several levels of face-to-face conversations. (which may also include occasional case analysis, workshop or sample project delivery)
The real question to explore is, how does one get selected for an interview?
That depends on (what I’d like to call) your “Trust Score”. A Trust Score is basically analysing each and every keyword in your resume and mapping it withrelevance and the trust value it holds in the local market (the local market in this example is Sweden). Two main parameters involved in calculating Trust Scores are,
- Brands — The brand of your associated university, company and organizations/groups.
- Networks — Your friends, colleagues, clients, acquaintances and basically every person you are connected with.
Considering our example as Sweden, imagine a person born & raised here. Naturally, this person would score high in Trust Score compared to their foreign alternatives because every connection/ brand this person associates with, has a greater probability to carry a higher Trust Score in the local market.
To quote a simple example: Stockholm school of Economics would have a considerably greater trust value in Sweden as a brand compared to Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics (Portugal) even though according to the recent Financial Times business school report they share similar overall rankings.
Thus when you are a person from abroad, calculation of this Trust Score becomes tricky since the universities, companies and networks are harder to validate in the context of the local market as they are limited to the recruiters knowledge.
The above problem is also felt by Swedes who’ve worked abroad for many years and come back home realising how difficult it is for them to land on their next job.
This stresses the need for an external and more structured validation mechanism in Sweden and Nordics that will not only open doors for our refugee talents to the job market but also make us more attractable for international talents to come and work.
Good news is, change has already begun as we see companies like Sqore growing fast along with increasing initiatives from different hackathon groups creating new ways to validate skills for recruitment. But nevertheless this a road under construction that awaits more actions.
As a job seeker from abroad, even though brand recognition of your previous education or experience can be tricky, building your own network has never been easier with multiple meetups and social media channels. As we discussed in my previous blog, the law of overlapping social circles can always give you the needed competitive advantage when it comes to building your network.
And finally, you can always overpower any trust score and gain the ultimate respect of a company, if you prove that you understand their business and communicate exactly on how you can add value to them with your skills instead of leaving this whole process of recruitment to them. Adding portfolio or strategizing your online branding can open up more doors than you can possibly imagine. But however a detailed discussion in this area is in order but however for an other day!
