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Prior research has shown that highly skilled international talents are often unemployed or underemployed in Finland, which has various negative impacts on international talent attraction as well as the development of the country and its individual regions. This study aims to gain an understanding of highly skilled international talent employment from the perspective of local employers. Hence, this study investigates the challenges, benefits, and experiences of employing highly skilled internationals, which in turn provides new practical insights about the suitability of the public services fostering international talents in the region. The research gap was approached by a qualitative case study method and focused on the Pirkanmaa region. The empirical data consists of seven interviews with micro and small-sized enterprises and six interviews with specialists from local public services. The interview data were analysed by abductive content analysis. The findings addressed various benefits and challenges to international talent employment. The benefits of highly skilled talent employment were recognised on two levels; the business and regional levels, which partly overlap. The region benefits from internationalisation by maintaining global competitiveness, facilitating economic development, and supporting multiculturality, which leads to stimulating innovations. International working teams feature higher creativity and advanced international business development due to various language skills and target market knowledge. The perceived barriers were primarily on meso-level and consisted of issues with language proficiency, considering both the job seekers and work team, conscious or unconscious country labelling and problematic qualification recognition and fear of the unknown, which was characterised by lack of knowledge or awareness. Furthermore, the awareness and perceived suitability of local public services fostering international talent employment were discussed. The research shows positive responses from the companies having previous experience with the services, however, the need for raising awareness and recognition of the services was revealed. The findings indicate that even though the employers are aware of the challenges international talent employment can represent, they express a positive attitude toward overcoming the potential barriers in the pursuance of suitable talent and the development of their businesses. This study makes theoretical contributions by supporting existing literature on topics related to international talent attraction in the context of the Pirkanmaa region environment while bringing new employers’ perspectives on challenges related to international talent employment. The resemblance of this case with the current literature suggests similar results if an analogous study was made in a comparable context. Nevertheless, further research with a wider data sample is needed to bring more generalisable results. An interesting direction of future research would be a comparative study of the employers’ perceptions based on their experience with international talent employment. |
