The public awareness program Work in Estonia aimed at foreign specialists has raised a lot of interest in working in Estonia. In the first phase of the program more than 400 applications from Ukraine and Finland have been submitted to Estonia’s employers.
Karin Patune, the Project Leader of Work in Estonia says that looking at the feedback received it can be concluded that awareness campaigns conducted in target countries have helped to make the offers by Estonian companies more visible. During last seven months the job offers in the portal have been viewed for almost 40,000 times.
In addition to introducing the offered job and the organization offering it, it is as important to introduce the country where the job is located at. “Work in Estonia will help with what the companies themselves do not have the strength to do: introducing Estonia as an attractive place to work at, raising public awareness in the target countries and creating materials promoting Estonia,” says Patune.
The problem that Estonia’s companies mention as one of the factors slowing their development is the lack of qualified work force. Foreign specialists are mostly hired in case people with the needed skills are not found in Estonia.
The IT company Tieto Eesti has hired more than 70 Finns, Swedes, and Norwegians during the past year. “We have actively used the promotional materials provided by Work in Estonia. They have helped us introduce Estonia as a country to work at and Tieto as a good employer,” Laura Eelma, the HR manager of Tieto Eesti says.
According to the spokesperson of Pipedrive, Oksana Topor, you need good people to build good sales software. “We are looking for new talents from all over the world for the Pipedrive team but we mostly hire them for the office in Tallinn. This means that the talent should move to Tallinn. As the level of knowledge on the “Baltic Tiger” is different across the Globe, every kind of promotional work about Estonia will be of great help when hiring.” She adds that Work in Estonia helps the success story of Estonia’s technology sector gain extra attention and the companies to be seen on the foreign markets. Pipedrive saw a clear rise in the number of applications as a result of the recent Work in Estonia campaign in Finland.
The game-developer Playtech Estonia agrees that it is crucial to hire from abroad for some positions. During the campaign in Finland, the number of applications they received, almost doubled.
The business developer of the recruitment company Ctrl Madis Haasma says that every person coming from another country will bring international experience as a benefit – it might not be possible to find this kind of knowledge from the local market. Work in Estonia has helped Ctrl find a lot of contacts of strong specialists with an IT background.
The Work in Estonia project was created this Spring to help the companies in Estonia hire highly-qualified specialists from abroad. This year campaigns have been held in Finland and Ukraine.
