My wife spent a year at Hive Helsinki. She wrote clean code, showed up every day, built real projects. When it came time to find work, she couldn’t get a single interview. Not because she wasn’t good enough — because the market never told her what it actually wanted.
The Finnish tech market has real demand, but it never explains itself. Global rankings are irrelevant here — what’s hot in San Francisco has little to do with what Helsinki employers are posting this week. Bootcamp graduates and career switchers are left guessing, piecing together signals from job boards one listing at a time. Some invest months learning the wrong thing. That’s not a knowledge gap — it’s an information gap.
I’ve spent years in recruitment technology — building tools at Hireproof and Jobilla, sitting on the hiring side of the table. I’ve seen how decisions actually get made, which skills genuinely matter, and how much of the hiring process is theater. Most of the information candidates need to compete exists. It’s just never been aggregated and handed to them.
So I’m building the tool I wish we’d had. Real demand data from Finnish job postings, updated weekly, broken down by city and skill. No opinions, no annual surveys that are outdated before they’re published. Just what employers are actually asking for, right now.
Where the data comes from
Current sources
Job postings from Duunitori and The Hub. Skills are extracted from job descriptions and matched against a curated taxonomy. Data is aggregated and updated weekly through an automated pipeline.
Coming next
Työmarkkinatori (the public employment service), LinkedIn, and approaches to surface the hidden job market — piilotyöpaikat — the jobs that are never publicly advertised. That last one is the hardest and the most valuable.
Tell me what’s missing
This is early. The data is real but the product is still taking shape. If something is missing, broken, or would make this more useful for your situation — I want to hear it. Reach out on LinkedIn.
— Max