Three reasons Spotify staff may reject Sweden
High taxes on share payouts, low-quality schools and Stockholm’s housing shortage are the main factors making it harder for Spotify to recruit foreign talent to Sweden, the streaming giant’s HR boss, Katarina Berg, told Swedish news agency TT in an interview.
She called it a “skills exodus” which pushes not only foreign workers, but even Swedes to move abroad.
Stockholm remains the company’s HQ, but today it employs more people in New York, where there’s a greater pool of skilled engineers, Berg said. Engineers make up around 50 percent of Spotify staff, and Sweden’s homegrown talent isn’t enough to fill those positions.
Almost half of Spotify’s Sweden-based staff are foreigners from 76 countries around the world, with the top nationalities being Brazil, the UK, the US, India, France, Russia, Iran, Italy, Spain and Germany.
READ ALSO:
One of the perks that Spotify uses to attract people to the company is a share-based rewards programme that employees can take part in. But Berg said that Sweden’s high taxes on stock incentive plans cancel out a lot of the benefits that such a scheme offers.
“Depending on where in the world you work, you could get taxed 17 percent, 33 percent – or 56 percent, like in Sweden. Of course that could determine where an employee wants to work. You don’t choose Sweden then,” she said.
Advertisement
The housing shortage and lack of elite schools, in particular senior high schools, are also key factors, Berg argued.
“We get a lot of families who come here. They settle down. They want to stay here. They like the Swedish philosophy, with quite a lot of parental leave, another type of holidays and balance in life. But then when their children get so big that they need their grades to apply to a university somewhere, perhaps a US college, our Swedish schools are not up to scratch,” she said.
What are the positives and negatives about working in Sweden? Let us know in the comments.
