(2) Foreigners fill in niche job market

Several interviewees mentioned that highly skilled foreigners tend to fill the niche job market that native Finns either do not want to do, or are not skilled enough to do. Another interviewee also shared the same feeling of marginalization. It seems that from her point of view, some of the recruitment practices only favor Finnish applicants, and foreigners have less chance except by filling in a market niche that native people are not interested in. It seems that such recruitment practices can both result from a linguistic and cultural preference that the employers prefer to work in their native language and with people from similar cultural background. She said in the interview:

I don't think that I have the same opportunities for finding jobs/seeking promotion as the native Finns. It seems that we can only work in the fields where the native Finns are not interested to work. For example, statistical analysis seems to be one of my limited options. And this field attracts few, if any, Finnish educational researchers. I based my assumption on some real experiences. [ ... ] In one of the international projects that I got to know at its start, there was a vacant post-doc position which seemed to me very relevant to my husband. When I suggested his name to the project director, he said clearly that this position cannot be offered to a non-Finnish researcher.
