Inside Herizon where unemployment keeps disappearing

Reading headlines about an unemployment crisis feels oddly disconnected from my day-to-day reality.

Inside the Herizon bubble, the picture looks very different.

What I keep seeing, over and over again, is not a lack of jobs. It’s a lack of understanding of how job hunting actually works in the Nordics today. When people learn that, things start moving. Not overnight. Not without effort. But consistently.

Right now, 1,154 members of the Herizon community out of 2,814 are employed. That translates into an estimated €41.5M in annual salaries and roughly €16M in annual taxes. On a monthly level, that’s over €3M in salaries and more than €1M flowing back as taxes. A year ago, the number of employed community members was 572.

Same labor market. Same economy. Same headlines.

What changed was the approach.

The myth of visible jobs

A big part of the disconnect comes from how people think jobs appear. The public narrative still assumes that jobs are posted, people apply, and the best candidate wins. That still exists, but it’s no longer the dominant channel for many roles, especially in international, English-speaking, or flexible positions.

Most jobs today are hidden. They are shaped around people. They start as conversations. They come from referrals, internal discussions, and teams realizing they need someone who can do a specific thing right now. By the time a job posting exists, the role is often already half-filled mentally.

If your entire job search strategy is built around responding to postings, you’re late by default.

Proactivity beats credentials

What actually correlates with employment in our community is not education level, perfect CVs, or years of experience in Finland. It’s proactivity.

People who take the time to understand how Finnish and Nordic hiring works, who learn how to articulate their skills in a way that makes sense locally, who reach out, follow up, ask questions, and build weak ties, eventually get hired.

Not because the system is fair, but because it’s predictable once you see it clearly.

That predictability is what most support systems fail to teach.

Outdated support, modern market

A lot of public employment support is still designed for a labor market that no longer exists. Linear paths. Fixed roles. Formal processes. Heavy focus on documentation and compliance. Very little focus on networks, positioning, or the reality of how companies actually make hiring decisions.

At the same time, companies have become more flexible. Roles are shaped around projects. English is often the working language. Remote or hybrid setups are common. Teams care more about whether you can solve a problem than whether your background fits a predefined box.

There’s a gap there, and people fall into it.

What actually works

What works is helping people map their real skills, not their job titles. Teaching them how to talk about their work in concrete terms. Showing how to approach companies that aren’t hiring publicly. Normalizing outreach. Making rejection survivable. Turning job hunting into a system instead of a personal failure loop.

Once people internalize that, employment becomes a matter of iteration, not luck.

That’s why the numbers move.

So is there really a crisis?

There are real structural issues in the labor market. No question. But when I look at our data, I don’t see a market where “there are no jobs.” I see a market where access to jobs is uneven, and where many people are simply not taught how the game is currently played.

That’s a solvable problem.

The more interesting question to me is not whether unemployment exists. It obviously does. The question is whether we’re willing to update the systems meant to reduce it.

Because from where I’m standing, when people get the right support, they do get hired.

And if the last year is any indication, the next question is simple:

Do we employ 1,000 people this year?