Change in talented immigrants attractiveness & leadership style

There are two key elements that slows us down in Finland to accelerate ideas from 1-10 and beyond (after a successful 0-1)
1) We are not attractive: We love Finland, and its an amazing country, but let’s face it. We have bad weather to most, we are kind of expensive to live in, and most recently, we have a border with a country that needless to say many would favor not to be close to, and our electoral outcomes tend to be a bad reputation for foreigners that might fear nationalism. This means, we need to look in the mirror and work hard to attract talents, the kind of talents that has options somewhere else, the ones that can help us move from 1-10.
Instead of banging our heads against all above, some we can’t even change, let’s:
- Offer taxation benefits: Like what Barcelona, Paris, and many other cities in and outside Europe does. Let’s attract talents
- Show success immigrants/expats stories more often as part of branding Finland, and as well internally so that people don’t associate foreigners only to click bait crime-related stories.

2) Favoritism & Nepotism: Finland is one of the highest countries in favoritism & nepotism, this may have organically developed due to being a small country and as well being less risk averse (hiring a friend or relative or a friend of a friend is safer). Problem is, this really repulses talents, both those we want to attract or those we helped developing locally and left us to leverage their skills somewhere else. How many Finnish startups or companies (1-10) has people of foreign backgrounds? In fact, has even people who didn’t know each other from before in C-level? How many mid-level talented foreign leadership left as they pretty much realized they will never grow into CXO level as it’s reserved to Finns & friends? We need to understand this prespective even if it’s not intentional favoritism and nepotism (which I believe it’s not as we have low bar and tolerance to corruption).

This two issues combined makes us a pretty unattractive country. In fact, even talented Finns in Tech now are leaving their home country. Hiring the right talent & gaining experience from outside is essential for us, so let’s fix that!