When you are an early stage startup with rapid product development, it is truly crucial that your team of founders and first employees work together and build a strong team. Due to the nature of their business, startups are often in the need of very talented individuals who are professionals in their own niche. For a Nordic startup, this means that sometimes they need to look beyond their region and lure high performing hires from all around the world. Yet, the Nordics is not Silicon Valley. It does not attract the same amount of business tourists and opportunists as the US. Plus there is the weather, which is definitely not something people would come for.
But when it comes to foreign talent, the Nordics do offer something very unique. If you start thinking more deeply what a senior game developer in hir os her thirties would value, it might actually be something different than just a big fat salary with nice vesting plan and Bay Area weather. What many of these individuals actually care is how safe the new environment would be for their kids, what the education system is like and how easy would it be to integrate into new society.
This is the approach that Nordic giants like Supercell and Spotify use in their hiring. For instance, Supercell’s career site boasts with the education system of Finland being free and top class in the world and advanced English skills of Helsinkians would make the integration process painlessly easy.
“If you like the idea of living in one of the cleanest and safest places on Earth, Finland might just be for you.”
-Supercell Careers website
On top of that, think about the amount of paid holiday days Nordic countries have by law. Five weeks of paid and almost mandatory vacation time in a year is truly something one cannot find from many other startup hubs in the world.
With this in mind, would you consider Nordics as your new destination point?
