How Northvolt attracts talent from Musk and Bezos to Sweden’s frozen north
When Christopher Gorelczenko left Jeff Bezo’s space startup Blue Origin for a job in Skellefteå, he had only ever seen the isolated Swedish city with 73,000 inhabitants on Google Maps. A former colleague had described the premises as “moose land”.
“The biggest surprise for me is how many people I see jogging or walking or going to the store by walking, even when it’s cold. It does not change from summer to winter,” he says. “You have people who are eighty years old who is still out doing his usual walk. “
He is one of dozens of key employees who have been attracted by the potential of the green battery company Northvolt, one of Europe’s most well-funded private companies, to move to a former mining town more than 750 km from Stockholm’s cosmopolitan luxury.
To achieve Northvolt’s green battery vision, it has been necessary to poach an incredible amount of specialist talent from companies such as Tesla, but also Amazon, Google and Spotify. A not insignificant number have left the United States for Sweden as Gorelczenko. He left Tesla in 2019 and helped build a rocket engine factory for Blue Origin. But after only about seven months, he was contacted by his former Tesla colleague Mike O’Regan, who had taken a job at Northvolt.
In addition to the 2,500 employees you now have, an additional 3,000 will be needed a new gig factory and R&D center in Gothenburg, in southern Sweden, are being built together with Volvo. The company employs up to 150 people a month from about 1,500 applications – hires faster than even the Swedish fintech giant Klarna, according to Dealroom data.
So how does a Swedish battery company do so many jobs? And convince so many of them to move to the “moose country”?
The power of the goal when it comes to attracting talent
A major driving force for this interest from talent is the company’s environmental agenda, says Northvolt’s growth manager Katarina Borstedt. (Although the newcomer – including the founder of the black hoodie Peter Carlsson often sports – can not hurt either.)
With a growing number of people wanting to work for a company with a mission, companies like Northvolt have the upper hand. According to a 2021 Deloitte survey, Almost half of Gen Zs and 44% of millennials intend to choose their work based on their personal ethics – and climate change is a high priority.
“I think the main attraction has been that when we started we were the first in Europe who wanted to build a completely green battery company. I think it’s still a big attraction for people applying to join us. And to be a part of something from scratch, says Borstedt.
In the beginning, Northvolt received most applications from young people and those in their 50s who could afford to take risks with their careers, says talent manager Martin Anderlind, who came in 2016. Many of the early applicants had start-up experience.
The founder and CEO Carlsson participated in all interviews until the number of employees made it unsustainable.
– Most people who joined early received a salary reduction in exchange for warrants, there was not much in the form of normal benefits and the risk of failure was obviously really high, Anderlind explains and adds that the company now has a pension plan and other benefits and increased cash salaries. .
“In the beginning, we mostly attracted very commissioned risk takers. Now we attract a wide range from recent graduates to experienced specialists [from] Worldwide.”
Tesla and attract founders
In addition to the 38-person recruitment team at Northvolt searching the world for talent, the company also benefits from its employees’ networks. Hence a mini-Tesla alumni network of about 40 people who have emerged.
Carlsson is also a former Tesla boss, and employees say he has kept his former employer’s startup mentality but stayed away from certain aspects of Elon Musk’s leadership style. At Northvolt, there is a similar atmosphere of getting things done, but according to Gorelczenko, Carlsson has managed to create a less stressful work environment.
“At Tesla, you always had your back to the wall every quarter. We had to reach specific figures and specific construction targets because we were still an untested industry. It was very high stress, high burn rate, especially at management level.
“While Northvolt must be the same part of doing something new from the ground up, it has a very supportive environment. Peter [Carlsson]is very open and fluid and he has the reach that he is available at all times. ”
Northvolt has even managed to lure founders away from its own startups, including Wilhelm Löwenhielm, the co-founder of solar energy startup Alight. He left his co-founders and team of 25 to go to Northvolt at the end of last year, as business development manager in Stockholm.
“Your startup will be a baby, you have recruited the people and you have a financial upside. But I became restless and it itched a bit to do something else operational,” says Löwenhielm.
Welcome to the moose country
Northvolt is often referred to as the startup of the north, but it has employees everywhere. The head office is located in Stockholm and the company’s R&D center is located in Västerås, an hour’s train journey west of the Swedish capital. Another factory is also being built in Gdansk, Poland, and established in Germany.
But Skellefteå, the city of Gorelczenko moved from the USA before and where 500 employees work at the factory, gets most of the PR. The Arctic Circle is traditionally a mining town and is less than 200 km away.
Growth manager Borstedt says that the company chose the city because of the residents’ “personality”.
“I would say that it has a big city atmosphere even if it is much smaller. And there are not many cities where people are so proud of their city. People walk around with hats with Skellefteå printed on.”
According to Gorelczenko, the city has everything you need when it comes to groceries, restaurants and shops. If something is not available, Stockholm is only an hour’s flight away.
Some wonder if Skellefteå could go the same way as Oulu, the small Finnish city where Nokia established itself and became the largest employer. When it collapsed, it became Oulu more or less a ghost town.
Fortunately for Skellefteå, this is unlikely. Northvolt is by no means the largest employer to date. That krona still goes to Boliden Mining, with 1,500 employees. And as Northvolt builds a factory in Skellefteå, others are following in its footsteps, such as the South Korean company Dongjin Sweden, which plans to build a factory nearby, with the aim of supplying carbon nanotube slurry, a material used in batteries, to Northvolt.
Northvolt has managed to attract people all over the world to work in Sweden in an incredibly short time – not everyone can expect to do the same, but the success bodes well for future Swedish entrepreneurs. This does not mean that immigration policy can not be difficult to manage or that all you need is $ 4 billion in the bank. But what is certain is that it is far enough to have an effect-oriented business and the network to steal from the world’s best as Tesla and Blue Origin.
Mimi Billing is Sifted’s Nordic correspondent. She also covers health technology and tweets from @MimiBilling