Matching meeting with IT asylum seekers: immediate results!

Yesterday, Thursday 29/9, a second attempt to match asylum seekers with IT/telecom background with employers took place. 14 candidates and 12 employers experienced fruitful meetings, which have already yielded results in the form of more booked interviews. We are now gearing up for more opportunities!

After our first attempt to bring together asylum seekers in need of work with IT and telecom companies in need of skills, a meeting held at the Swedish Migration Agency in April, we drew a number of lessons that we took with us in preparation for yesterday. Perhaps the most crucial improvement was that this time we asked the asylum seekers who wanted to participate to certify in advance that they have a working knowledge of English and a LinkedIn profile, and - for those with a developer background - to complete a programming test(Kattis) to demonstrate their skills.

The improvements created a better environment for all parties, which was very much in evidence during the meeting. We will now carefully evaluate the meeting and its impact for future meetings, to see if it has in fact led to what we want: that the candidates thanks to this enter the companies, either through internships or employment.

We can, however, take the liberty of directly addressing some of the positive comments I received by e-mail after the meeting, which indicate that we are at least on the right track!

From Jonas Olsson, VP Professional Services at 3G Network Services:

"Thank you for a well-organized matchmaking meeting. For us, this turned out very well and we have a total of 5 interesting candidates who may well have a future in our company. We have now booked these for deeper interviews tomorrow and next week."

From Alexandra Tihinen, HR CGI:

"Many thanks for today's event! [...] we think it was a great first event and above all a very good initiative! We would love to participate in the next events as well, and we are also open to getting more involved to organize similar events."

On my part, I'd like to thank Sigma IT Consulting for providing the venue, Kattis for sponsoring the programming test, and colleagues Carl-Johan Hamilton and Sofia Odéen at Ants, who did a lot of the footwork in preparing the candidates for the meetings - and of course all the companies that came!