Ministry wants to bring in 2,000 foreign workers through Enterprise Estonia

TALLINN – The Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications wants to bring in 2,000 information and communications technology (ICT) specialists through Enterprise Estonia, approximately 4 million euros is intended for the implementation of foreign recruitment support.

Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology Urve Palo has filed a regulation to the Finance Ministry for coordination, on the basis of which the application for foreign recruitment support and the conditions and procedure of the given measure will be confirmed.

As a result of the support, the number of foreign ICT specialists to start work in Estonia will increase by 2,000 people, it appears from the letter of explanation of the bill. According to the regulation, a company can file for support in the amount of 2,000 euros per one ICT specialist recruited from a foreign country.

The employment contract between the applicant and the recruited ICT specialist must be signed without a term or when signed for a specified term must be valid for at least 12 months from the moment of signing, while the employment contract must also be signed within the last 12 months before filing an application but not before Oct. 1, 2017. At that, the gross monthly salary of the recruited specialist must be at least 1,500 euros.

In addition, the ICT specialist recruited by the applicant cannot have studied or worked in Estonia for at least five years before starting work for the applicant. By the time of filing the application, the applicant must have been paying social tax for the recruited ICT specialist for at least five months.

The foreign recruitment support is implemented by Enterprise Estonia. The necessary tools for implementing the support, that is 4 million euros, will be allocated to Enterprise Estonia from the state budget.

The aim of granting the support is to stimulate foreign recruitment for ICT vacancies, which are difficult or complicated to find employees for from Estonia. With the help of the support, entrepreneurs can partly compensate the expenses concerning foreign recruitment, showing that a foreign ICT specialist, both from the European Union as well as from a third country, has stayed to work in Estonia.

First and foremost, the foreign recruitment unit is meant as a stimulating measure for those entrepreneurs who until now have recruited few or no people at all from foreign countries.

The regulation is linked with Estonia's competitiveness plan "Estonia 2020" and achieving the aims of "Estonia's entrepreneurship growth strategy 2014-2020" in involving foreign specialists, and the regulation will realize the action plan of involving foreign specialists and the development program of the ICT field.