What kind of employers create new jobs in Finland?

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This week in our blog we discuss a new report by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. It tells us what kind of employers create new jobs in Finland.  

If you are a job seeker in Finland it pays to know what kind of companies create new jobs. This knowledge allows you to focus your job search on those companies that are more likely to open positions for recruitment also in the future.

Heikki Räsänen and Minna France Email List Ylikännö’s report is based on data from 2021. Their analysis shows, however, that the characteristics of employment engines in Finland are relatively constant. Hence their conclusions about the 2021 data can be used to predict the future.

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What is a new job?
As we have discussed before based on an earlier report of this kind, companies look for new employees for three main reasons.

They need to replace someone who has moved onward to work at another position. This new position might be within the company or they might have switched companies.

Another reason is that the person has left the workforce entirely. They may have retired, moved to another country, gone on extended family leave, or started studying full-time. Whatever the reason, the person is no longer part of the Finnish labor force.

When jobs open up for these reasons, the government doesn’t consider these ‘new jobs’  since they do not add to the number of people the company employs. As an extension, they do not add to the general employment rate in the country. The employer is merely replacing an employee with a new one. These two types just differ in the reason for the replacement.

New jobs, instead, are positions that add to the personnel figures of the employer. There are two different types of new jobs.

One is that the employer needs additional people to do existing jobs. Like a factory adding a new production line to respond to an increase in demand. The new production line has the same kinds of jobs as the previous production lines. So, there are more people doing the same stuff as before.

Another type is when a company decides it needs to create a completely new position altogether. Get someone to do something that hasn’t been done before in that company. In both of these cases, the employer has more employees than before. There’s growth.



The report we discuss here examines what kind of businesses created new jobs in Finland in 2021.

Recruitment in Finland in 2021
Last year, 58 224 employer locations (an employer can have several offices or locations) opened searches for new employees for permanent employment relationships. These locations or offices had 201 000 open positions.

Another 51 722 locations opened searches for 352 000 fixed-term employees. Some locations or offices had both permanent and temporary positions open.

Of all of the 553 000 open positions, 52 148 (9.4 %) were not positions requiring Finnish or Swedish.

All in all, about 54 % of all Finnish offices/locations had positions open in 2021.

Compared with 2020, there were more open positions and they were more often permanent positions.  

20 % offices/locations recruited both permanent and fixed-term employees. 15 % were only looking for fixed-term employees and 19 % were only looking for permanent employees. In Finland, employment relationships are by default permanent. There must be a specific and acceptable reason for the position to be fixed-term.

In 2021, a common reason for offices/locations (23.3 %) to recruit was because the employee had left for another employer. 16.5 % of recruiting offices/locations explained their recruitment need with substitution. 6.7 % gave retirement(s) as a reason. A small portion of the offices/locations (3.3 %) needed to find someone new because the previous person had switched jobs within the company.