The new recruitment office focuses solely on the needs of immigrant job seekers | News
The recently established recruitment office in Helsinki aims to focus solely on helping Finnish immigrants find work according to their qualifications and experience and promises not to offer, for example, cleaning work to engineers.
Eezy Shine is located near the Puhos shopping center in the eastern part of the capital and the CEO Shah Jaff told Yle that his reasons for founding the company can be guessed just by looking in the city center.
“Look around you. It’s a working day and there are a lot of immigrants around. That means something is missing. Our job is to connect these people’s skills to the job market,” Jaff said.
To further illustrate the point, Jaff pointed to his glasses on the table.
“If you’re going to sell these glasses, you need to know what brand they are, what their strengths are and what kind of glasses they are. You need to know what you’re selling,” he said.
In this regard, Jaff said that he believes that it is easier for recruitment agents to find jobs for other immigrants when they themselves are people with an immigrant background who have experience in job search work in Finland.
“If I don’t know what kind of job seekers I have, I can’t sell their skills. But our knowledge doesn’t come from the outside, it comes from the inside,” Jaff added.
Eezy Shine offers services in 32 different languages, says Jaffi, who himself is of Iraqi background and speaks 14 different languages. Therefore, the company’s goal is to interview all job seekers in their native language about work experience, education and language skills.
“Then we go over the Finnish labor regulations with all the employees, because everyone has a different background. Each newcomer has worked in his own country, so our job is to adapt his skills to the Finnish labor market,” Jaff said, adding that the company’s mission is to offer work to people who have special difficult to find a job in Finland.
Eezy Shine is, Jaff told Yle, the first recruitment agency in Finland that focuses solely on the special needs of immigrants.
Jaff added that the company has so far found roles for a few hundred employees in various industries and continues to operate with the primary goal of finding jobs that match the skills and qualifications of each individual job seeker.
“The image of immigrants is usually that they do cheap, low-paying jobs,” he said, noting that one of his company’s clients is a qualified engineer who has been offered cleaning jobs.
“It’s not fair. I’ll find him a suitable job,” he said.
An immigrant’s level of Finnish language skills can often be a decisive factor in whether or not he gets a job offer, but Jaff told Yle that he believes that there are many jobs in Finland that do not require fluent Finnish.
“If an immigrant has trouble learning a language, that doesn’t mean he has to be unemployed for the rest of his life,” Jaff said, adding that perfect language skills are not required for jobs like berry picking, many agricultural jobs. , service roles, photography and other creative professions.
Ministry: Work situation for immigrants “better than ever”
Antti KaihovaaraThe chief expert of the Labor Migration and Integration Unit of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment told Yle that the employment situation for foreigners in Finland is currently at its best since the records began.
According to statistics published by the ministry in August, there were 7 percent fewer unemployed immigrants in Finland in July than in the corresponding month last year, while the employment rate of Finnish citizens was 7.2 percentage points higher than that of foreigners.
Kaihovaara also stated that the number of unemployed job seekers of Estonian, Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese background has decreased considerably, by more than 20 percent compared to the same period last year.
The ministry’s figures also revealed that it is particularly difficult for asylum seekers to find employment, which, according to Kaihovaara, is due to how long it takes them to recover from their experiences at home and adapt to Finnish life.
Language skills also play a role, and many asylum seekers do not speak English when they arrive in Finland. However, Kaihovaara also stated that the employment rate of those who arrived in Finland as asylum seekers for the first time rises quickly when they have a residence permit and a home.
This improvement in the employment rate of immigrants is the result of many factors, Kaihovaara added, including the development of employment services and the general economic upswing.
“Employment of immigrants reacts to economic fluctuations more strongly than the employment rate of the native population. Finland has had good economic growth, which has improved employment especially among immigrants,” Kaihovaara said.
However, the gender gap is still large: the employment of immigrant women is about 15 percentage points lower than that of men. On the other hand, the situation is very different among second-generation immigrant women, whose employment rate is slightly higher than that of second-generation immigrant men.
Corrosion Hazard: There is a “slight risk”
In general, according to Kaihovaara, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has a very positive attitude towards recruitment agencies like Eezy Shine, which aim to help immigrants in their job search.
“I see the possibility of such a service to offer even better services especially for immigrants and identify their skills and sell them to employers,” Kaihovaara said and added that a recruitment agency that focuses solely on the needs of immigrants is one way to reduce discrimination in the labor market.
“There is potential here if it could help combat labor market discrimination and convince employers that recruiting immigrants is worthwhile, even if their Finnish language skills are not always that of native speakers,” he pointed out.
On the other hand, according to Kaihovaara, it is possible that immigrants will continue to be offered mostly low-paid and low-income jobs even through companies like Eezy Shine. According to the ministry, immigrants are much more likely to do manual labor than people of Finnish background.
“The risk is so small, but in principle I am positive about the private side supporting the public employment service,” Kaihovaara said.
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