In 2015, 32,478 asylum seekers entered Finland in a matter of months. The public sector was overwhelmed and no structured employment support existed. Startup Refugees was born that year — and ten years later, they have placed 2,200 people into work and trained more than 15,000. This is the story of how they rebuilt their digital matching infrastructure with Jobful, and what the Match platform is doing for refugee and migrant employment in Finland today.
TL;DR
Startup Refugees is a Finnish non-profit with a 10-year record of connecting asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants with meaningful work. Their Jobful-powered platform — Match, made in Startup Refugees — holds over 10,000 verified professional profiles and serves as the digital backbone for their employment and entrepreneurship programmes. This case study covers the challenge they faced with their previous fragmented system, why they chose Jobful, how the platform works, and what the outcomes have been for job seekers, employers, and the broader mission.
Key Takeaways
10,000+
Verified professional profiles in Match
2,200
People placed into employment
15,000+
Trained in workplace skills
60%
Retention beyond year one
In the autumn of 2015, 32,478 asylum seekers entered Finland. The country had not seen anything like it since World War II. Reception centres operated beyond capacity. The public sector was overwhelmed. And despite the legal right to work, no structured support existed to help these new arrivals find jobs or start businesses.
Two Finnish entrepreneurs, Riku Rantala and Tunna Milonoff, saw something different in that moment. Not a crisis to contain, but a brain gain the country was squandering. They called together everyone willing to do something concrete. Within two weeks, several government ministries, dozens of NGOs, and over 250 companies had joined. Startup Refugees was born.
Ten years later, the network has grown to over 5,000 members — companies, public and private sector organisations, universities, and individuals — all united around a single mission: equal and meaningful professional opportunities for migrants and refugees in Finland. The results of that decade: 2,200 people placed into employment, 1,300 entrepreneurs supported, and workplace skills training provided to more than 15,000 people.
The economic case is clear too. Every unemployed refugee or migrant costs Finnish public finances an estimated €16,000 per year. Each employment placement reverses that calculation: the person stops drawing on public support and starts contributing through taxes. With 60% of Startup Refugees’ placements retaining their positions beyond year one, the accumulated financial value to Finnish society compounds year on year. The mission and the economics point in the same direction.
As Startup Refugees grew, so did the complexity of what they were trying to do. The early model — visiting reception centres, manually gathering skills data, making introductions person by person — couldn’t scale without digital infrastructure. A first platform was built, and for a time it served the purpose. But as the organisation’s ambitions grew, the gaps became harder to work around.
The core problems, as Startup Refugees described them, were structural:
The need was clear: a platform that was centralised, data-driven, user-friendly for people with varied linguistic and digital backgrounds, and genuinely adaptable to the specific requirements of an inclusive employment mission. The search for it led, via an unexpected route, to Jobful.
In 2023, Startup Refugees attended a UNHCR-hosted event in Geneva. There, they met representatives from Jobs4Ukraine — a platform connecting Ukrainian refugees with employers across Europe, launched in response to the displacement crisis that followed the 2022 invasion. They were impressed. When they asked what technology powered it, the answer was Jobful.
The Jobs4Ukraine reference was meaningful. It wasn’t a corporate pilot or a proof of concept — it was a live deployment handling thousands of refugee job seekers in a high-urgency, high-stakes context. If the platform worked there, it had demonstrated something important: it could operate at scale in a social impact environment where user experience, inclusivity, and reliability were non-negotiable.
Back in Finland, Startup Refugees ran a structured evaluation, meeting with multiple platform providers to understand their options. At the end of that process, they chose Jobful for three specific reasons:
The result of the Jobful implementation is Match — made in Startup Refugees, accessible at match.startuprefugees.com. It is the digital backbone of everything Startup Refugees does in employment and entrepreneurship support — the place where job seekers build their professional identity, and where employers come to find the international talent that the Finnish labour market too often overlooks.
For job seekers, Match is a comprehensive professional profile platform. Users document their education, work experience, skills, language capabilities, motivation, and career goals in detail. The profile isn’t just a CV — it maps the whole person: their professional background, their aspirations, their readiness for different types of opportunity, and their interest in entrepreneurship or skills development. Every person who creates a profile in Match is verified as motivated and ready to engage. This is not a passive database of cold contacts — it is a living network of people actively seeking the next step in rebuilding their professional lives.
For employers, Match is a searchable talent pool of pre-verified, motivated professionals from international backgrounds. Companies including IKEA, Tietoevry, Freska, and ISS Finland use the platform to find candidates that match their specific needs — with Startup Refugees’ network coordinators providing active support at every stage: pre-interviewing, screening, multilingual communication with candidates, and onboarding support.
Beyond job matching, Match also functions as an access point to the full Startup Refugees ecosystem: entrepreneurship programmes, mentoring, training courses, and networking events. A job seeker who discovers through their profile-building process that they want to start a business can be connected directly to the relevant support pathway — all within the same platform.
“Jobful has been an incredible partner in supporting our mission. Their platform has transformed the way we connect job seekers with opportunities, making the process seamless and data-driven. We feel heard and understood through this collaboration.”
Aicha Manai, CEO, Startup Refugees
Startup Refugees went into the Jobful implementation with one clear concern: that once the platform was live, the communication would fade. In social impact contexts, this is a familiar pattern. A vendor wins the contract with responsive, attentive sales conversations — and then the post-implementation support drops to the bare minimum, leaving a mission-driven organisation managing a complex platform without adequate help.
That didn’t happen. In Startup Refugees’ own words: “We are very happy our fear was uncalled for.” The Jobful team has maintained continuous communication, adapted the platform based on user feedback and evolving requirements, and resolved issues quickly when they arose. Customer support has been, as Startup Refugees described it, exceptional.
This matters beyond the practical. For an organisation whose effectiveness depends on the trust of some of the most vulnerable job seekers in Finland, a platform that is unreliable or poorly supported isn’t just inconvenient — it undermines the credibility of the service. The reliability of the Jobful partnership has allowed Startup Refugees to extend that trust through the platform to the job seekers who depend on it.
The improvements since implementing Jobful have been consistent across every dimension Startup Refugees tracks.
| Dimension | What changed |
|---|---|
| Profile creation | A growing number of job seekers are creating complete, verified professional profiles — making the pool richer and more useful for employers searching for specific skills |
| Employer engagement | Companies actively post opportunities on the platform, supported by Startup Refugees network coordinators — with major Finnish employers participating regularly |
| Job placements | An increasing number of successful placements and training participants, with the platform providing the data trail to track and demonstrate impact |
| User experience | Consistently positive feedback from job seekers and internal staff — the platform is experienced as easy to use and effective in matching opportunities |
| Training facilitation | Skills development and entrepreneurship programmes are more easily organised, promoted, and tracked within the platform — directly addressing one of the core gaps in the previous system |
The qualitative dimension is equally important. As Startup Refugees described it: eventually, the platform will lead to even greater trust and engagement within their community — because members now have a reliable, professional tool for job search and professional growth that reflects the seriousness of their aspirations. For many refugees and asylum seekers, being met with a well-designed, respectful digital experience is itself meaningful. It signals that their professional identity matters and that the system they’re entering is built for them, not just around them.
Want to see the Match platform in action? Visit match.startuprefugees.com to explore how Startup Refugees connects international professionals with Finnish employers — or read about Jobful’s broader social impact work at jobful.io/solutions/ngos-public-sector.
Startup Refugees is one deployment in a growing social impact ecosystem that Jobful has built deliberately — not as a marketing exercise, but as a core part of what the platform is for.
The same Talent Community Software that helps multinational companies build pre-qualified candidate pools and reduce time-to-hire is the infrastructure that powers these social impact platforms. The core capabilities are identical: profile-building, gamified engagement, skills matching, employer-facing search, outcome tracking. What changes is the context, the user base, and the accessibility requirements — all of which Jobful’s customisation architecture accommodates.
Match — made in Startup Refugees
10,000+ verified profiles of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in Finland. Connects job seekers and employers with multilingual support from Startup Refugees’ network coordinators.
Visit platform →Jobs4Ukraine
Launched in response to the 2022 displacement crisis. Over 16,000 Ukrainian professionals and 2,500 employers registered. More than 12,000 recorded engagements.
Visit platform →Jobs4all.ro
Launched in 2024. Connects people with disabilities in Romania with employers, NGOs, and career mentors — building a more inclusive job market through structured digital support.
Visit platform →The common thread is that technology doesn’t create inclusion by itself. It creates the conditions where the human work of inclusion — the network coordinators at Startup Refugees who support candidates in their own language, the employer partnerships developed over years, the mentors and trainers who participate in the ecosystem — can operate at a scale that manual processes never could. The platform is the infrastructure. The people are the mission.
Startup Refugees is a Finnish social innovation initiative that supports asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants in finding employment, developing professional skills, and starting businesses in Finland. Founded in 2015 by Riku Rantala and Tunna Milonoff in response to the sudden arrival of over 32,000 asylum seekers, the organisation has grown into a network of more than 5,000 members — including companies, public and private sector organisations, universities, and individuals — all committed to building a Finland where every migrant has equal and meaningful access to professional opportunities. 2025 marks their tenth year of operation and a decade of measurable impact: 2,200 people placed into work, 15,000 trained, 1,300 entrepreneurs supported.
Jobful’s platform powers employment support for refugees, migrants, and people with disabilities across Europe — and the same technology helps leading companies build diverse, pre-qualified talent pipelines. Whether you’re a social impact organisation looking for the right digital infrastructure, or a company wanting to connect with motivated international talent, Jobful has the platform for it.
Key Statistics
2,200
people placed into employment over 10 years — ~250 per year
Startup Refugees 10 Years of Impact Report, 2025
€16,000
estimated annual cost to public finances per unemployed migrant or refugee in Finland
Startup Refugees impact calculator, multiple sources
16,000+
Ukrainian professionals registered on Jobs4Ukraine, Jobful’s parallel social impact deployment
Jobful Social Impact, 2024
Match — made in Startup Refugees (match.startuprefugees.com) is a digital employment platform built on Jobful’s Talent Community Software, designed for asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in Finland. Job seekers create detailed professional profiles covering education, work experience, skills, motivation, and career goals. Employers search those profiles to find international talent that matches their needs. The platform also connects users to entrepreneurship programmes, mentoring, and skills development resources. Every profile in Match is verified — all users are confirmed as motivated and ready to work or develop professionally.
Startup Refugees evaluated several platforms and chose Jobful for three specific reasons: the gamified and customisable Talent Community Software aligned with their mission-driven approach; the platform provided seamless integration of sourcing, ATS, and career site in one place; and it was adaptable to the accessibility and inclusivity requirements of their audience. The discovery came through a UNHCR event in Geneva in 2023, where they met Jobs4Ukraine representatives and learned their platform was built on Jobful — providing a direct proof point of the technology working in a comparable social impact context.
Since implementing Jobful, Startup Refugees has seen growing profile creation by job seekers, increased employer engagement with companies actively posting opportunities, an increasing number of successful placements and training participants, and consistently positive feedback from both job seekers and staff. Over the organisation’s 10-year history — with Jobful now powering their digital infrastructure — Startup Refugees has facilitated employment for 2,200 individuals, trained 1,300 entrepreneurs, and provided workplace skills training for more than 15,000 people.
Jobful’s social impact portfolio includes three active platforms: the Startup Refugees Match platform for refugees and migrants in Finland; Jobs4Ukraine (jobs4ukr.com), which connects 16,000+ Ukrainian professionals with 2,500 employers; and Jobs4all.ro, serving people with disabilities in Romania. All three use Jobful’s core Talent Community Software, adapted for the specific context and accessibility requirements of each population. Learn more at jobful.io/solutions/ngos-public-sector.
Organisations can use Jobful to partner with social impact deployments like Startup Refugees to access pre-verified, motivated candidate pools; build their own talent community with diversity and inclusion filters built into the matching and assessment architecture; use gamified challenges to surface capability independently of credentials — which reduces structural bias in CV-first screening; and generate skills data that supports workforce planning across underrepresented talent segments. Visit jobful.io/solutions/ngos-public-sector or book a demo at jobful.io/book-demo to explore what this looks like in practice.
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