International Organization for Migration (IOM)

The Swedish Institute’s portal is available at www.workinginsweden.se and contains
information in English about national laws and rules together with facts about living
conditions in Sweden. The aim is to encourage third-country nationals to choose
Sweden as a labour destination. This portal also contains links to online courses in
Swedish and the EURES portal (OECD, 2012). This year ‘Working in Sweden’
has had around 450,000 visits, and most of the people visiting the site were from
Sweden, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom (Si, 2012). The
most frequently visited part of the site is where the labour shortage list is presented.
Third-country nationals are satisfied with the Migration Board’s and the Swedish
Institute’s websites that primarily provide information on the regulations and
procedures involved in obtaining a work permit in Sweden. However, potential
migrants would like more information about available jobs and the recruitment
process (Employment Service, 2012e). A downfall of these two websites is that they
do not assist employers and employees in the actual recruitment.
If one is looking for work in Sweden one can access the EURES Job Mobility Portal,
which is automatically updated with job advertisements from the Swedish Public
Employment Service. The problem is that those job advertisements are not aimed
at third-country nationals. Most offers are published in Swedish with a Swedish
audience in mind (PES 1, 2012). Besides this service there is no public channel
supporting employees in finding Swedish employers.
According to the European Migration Network (2012) most of the information for
employees is found through private channels or through recruitment agencies. The
Swedish Migration Board demonstrates that the most common ways for migrants
to find work in Sweden are by i) being transferred within a company, ii) contacting a
company directly, and iii) using personal contacts (MB, 2012).
Workers with high skills have access to a large variety of networks: personal,
business, and web-based, such as LinkedIn (PES 2, 2012). They are more likely to
be recruited by large, multinational companies and transferred within companies in
sectors where there exists a large demand for skilled labour. Low-skilled workers,
on the other hand, have fewer instruments at their disposal and have to rely on
informal contacts and personal connections. If the migrants do not have personal
connections they might have to pay companies in their countries of origin to seek
information and a work offer. A similar type of information service exists in Sweden
where asylum-seekers that have been denied asylum can pay specialized lawyers to
acquire information about regulations and obtain job offers (GC, 2012).
Pelling and Nordlund (2012) conducted an interview study of Iraqi immigrants in
Sweden with a focus on labour migration. They describe that their main motive for
moving to Sweden was to get out of Iraq and a Swedish work permit allowed them
to do so. They used contacts and social networks, often relatives, to obtain a job offer.
The idea of getting in touch with Swedish employers from Iraq without personal
connections seemed unrealistic to the interviewees. Statistics from the Migration
Board support these statements and show that many of the employers that hire
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