Job Market Finland
Finland's national public employment platform, run by the KEHA Centre. Its Skills Suggester proposes occupations and competences from free text, while an AI matching calculation scores job postings against applicant profiles. Free of charge and publicly funded.
What is Job Market Finland?
Job Market Finland (Työmarkkinatori) is the online public service that brings together information, services and tools about working life for citizens, employers, companies and public employment authorities. It is published by the KEHA Centre under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, and it grew out of the TE-digi programme that ran from 2017 to 2025; the first production version replaced the te-palvelut.fi service in 2022.
Two components are described by the publisher as artificial intelligence. The first is the Skills Suggester (osaamissuosittelija), which proposes keywords for a job search profile. The user writes free text; the service compares it with descriptions of occupations and returns the professions that fit best, together with related competences. The publisher's own example is telling: a text mentioning forest and trees leads to forestry worker, forestry machine operator or forest management adviser, and to skills such as inspecting trees or planting trees. The vocabulary comes from the FINESCO glossary of occupations and competences, itself largely based on the European ESCO glossary, which keeps the terms comparable across the European labour market. Occupations and skills reinforce each other, and the choices already made by the user feed back into later suggestions.
The second is the matching calculation (kohtaanto), which looks for suitable vacancies for applicants and suitable applicants for vacancies. It is not one model but a sum of search algorithms, each contributing a score. Some are simple, rewarding shared keywords, matching languages or a driving licence. Others analyse written text and connect terms belonging to the same subject area, so that lawyer, law and court link documents that never share a word.
The service is candid about the limits. A vacancy may carry requirements the calculation cannot represent, an applicant may have described their skills in different words, and essential keywords may simply be missing. Matching therefore returns a set of opportunities to choose from rather than a single right answer, and the Skills Suggester only suggests: the user, whether a job applicant or an employment authority, decides which keywords to keep.
What it does
- Suggest occupations and competences from free text written by the user (Skills Suggester)
- Score and rank job postings against an applicant profile, and applicant profiles against a vacancy
- Search and browse open vacancies without any login
- Let employers find candidates by search terms without publishing a posting
- Answer questions about the site's content through the Tarmo chatbot
- Forward every published vacancy automatically to the European EURES portal
- Expose job postings, applicant profiles and training data through public APIs
When to use Job Market Finland / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Job Market Finland is the right fit.
When to use Job Market Finland
- Job seekers in Finland who want openings that match their actual skills rather than a keyword they guessed
- People changing careers who struggle to name their own competences and need suggestions drawn from a structured glossary
- Employers in Finland who publish a vacancy and want to see the closest applicant profiles without running a separate search
- Public employment authority caseworkers, whom the service names explicitly as users of the Skills Suggester
- Aspiring entrepreneurs, who can use the business plan tool and the entrepreneurship tests without logging in
When not to use Job Market Finland
- Recruiters hiring outside the Finnish labour market, since this is Finland's own public employment service
- Employers looking for a full applicant tracking system: the platform publishes vacancies, it does not manage a hiring pipeline
- Anyone unwilling to identify themselves, as the official E-services and My job path sections require a login
- People under 15, the stated age limit for E-services and for registering as a job seeker
- Teams shopping for a generative AI assistant: the matching is a scored ensemble of search algorithms, not a language model
How to use Job Market Finland
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the service in Finnish, Swedish or English, or use the plain-language and Sámi sections
- Browse open vacancies, training courses and employment services without logging in
- Try the entrepreneurship tests and the business plan tool, which also need no login
- Identify yourself through the Suomi.fi services to reach E-services and My job path
- Create a job applicant profile under My job path
- Write free text describing your experience and let the Skills Suggester propose occupations and competences
- Select the keywords that genuinely fit, then refresh the suggestions so they take your choices into account
- Receive suggestions for open jobs matched against the profile you have built
- As an employer, use Business E-services to publish a posting, review matching profiles and message candidates
- For system-to-system use, work through the published interfaces for postings, profiles or training data
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The publisher documents publicly how both AI components work, including their scoring logic and their limits
- Free of charge for users and other parties, with no commercial model behind it
- The human keeps the decision: the Skills Suggester proposes keywords, the user chooses them
- The vocabulary is anchored in ESCO, which makes the skills terminology interoperable across Europe
- Public APIs are documented and each family carries its own terms of use
- Unusually broad language coverage, including Northern, Inari and Skolt Sámi as well as plain Finnish
- A formal published decision governs the use of automated decision-making, with an accessibility statement alongside
Cons
- Scope is national: the service is designed for the Finnish labour market
- The terms of use still describe the service as a beta version although it has been in production since 2022
- No mobile application on either iOS or Android
- No security certification is published, neither ISO 27001 nor SOC 2
- No list of subprocessors and no hosting country are disclosed
- Nothing on the site addresses whether customer data may be used to train models, or how to opt out
- The matching calculation acknowledges it cannot represent a vacancy's special requirements
Pricing & Plans
The service is free of charge. The terms of use state plainly that use of the service is free for the user and for other parties, and describe Job Market Finland as a publicly funded digital service. There is no pricing page, no paid tier and no published amount anywhere on the site, so no entry price can be quoted. The public interfaces are governed by their own terms of use but carry no tariff either. There is no free trial, because there is nothing to trial: the whole service is free.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Job Market Finland handles your data.
GDPR overview
The privacy statement is built directly on the GDPR and names the articles it applies: Article 15 for access, Article 16 for rectification, Article 18 for restriction. It also records a statutory limit, stating that data subjects have no Article 18 right to restrict processing of the data referred to in section 114, subsection 1 of the Act on the Organisation of Employment Services. A data protection officer is designated with a dedicated address, the lawful basis is identified as the controller's statutory obligation, and the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman is named as the supervisory authority. The service never claims compliance in so many words, which is why no compliance flag is asserted here. No Article 27 representative is designated, and none is required: the controller is a Finnish state authority established in the European Union.
Who owns the data?
The KEHA Centre and the employment authorities are joint controllers of the national data repository for employment services and of the repository for job applicant profiles. Each employment authority answers for its own customers; the KEHA Centre answers for applicant profiles when the person is not the customer of any authority. Processing rests on the controllers' statutory obligation, not on consent, because the service delivers duties laid down in law. A data protection officer is designated for the KEHA Centre. Job postings published on the platform are forwarded automatically to the European EURES portal under the EURES Regulation.
Reuse rights
Personal data is processed to carry out the statutory employment-service duties of the controllers, not for commercial reuse. Job seekers' profiles are held anonymously and scored against vacancy requirements by the matching calculation; employers see matching profiles rather than identified individuals until contact is made. Every vacancy published on the platform is transferred automatically to the EU-wide EURES portal, an obligation the terms of use attribute to the EURES Regulation rather than to a choice by the publisher. Chatbot conversations are anonymised automatically by the application, and the service states that no personal data is stored on them; the resulting material is used to develop the tool's performance and to train customer service staff. The terms grant users a right of access to the service, not ownership of it: the service provider holds the proprietary, copyright and other intellectual property rights.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The service does not publish where its data is hosted. No hosting country, no region and no data centre is named in the terms of use, the privacy statement or any other page collected, and no list of subprocessors is disclosed. What the privacy statement does say about handling is organisational rather than geographic: staff processing personal data in the customer guidance and advice division of the KEHA Centre sign a confidentiality commitment, and register data is used only by people who need it for their work tasks. The jurisdiction is nonetheless clear from the controller rather than from a hosting statement. The KEHA Centre is a Finnish public authority, the terms of use are governed by Finnish law, and the supervisory authority named for data protection is the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman. Readers who need a contractual guarantee about hosting location should ask for it, because the published documentation does not provide one.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Job Market Finland.
- Trusting the ranking too readily: the matching calculation returns a set of opportunities, not a correct answer, and it cannot represent a vacancy's special requirements
- Letting the Skills Suggester define your own identity: keywords drawn from a glossary can flatten experience that does not map onto a standard occupation
- Under-describing yourself and blaming the tool: the service states that results depend on selecting enough matching keywords, so a thin profile quietly produces thin recommendations
- Losing sight of where a vacancy goes: every published posting is forwarded automatically to the European EURES portal, which is not an opt-in choice
- Assuming no automation touches your case: a published decision of 14 October 2024 introduced automated decision-making for employment statements, distinct from the profiling the privacy statement rules out
- Overlooking the identification requirement: official services need a Suomi.fi login, so the anonymous browsing experience is not the whole service
- Reading silence as reassurance: the service says nothing about hosting jurisdiction, subprocessors, or whether data may be used to train models
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Nothing to install. Vacancies, training courses and the entrepreneurship tests can be used straight away without an account. Reaching the official sections, E-services and My job path, requires identification through the Suomi.fi services, and acting on behalf of an organisation uses Suomi.fi e-Authorizations, so the effort is administrative rather than technical. For system-to-system use the effort is real but bounded: three documented families of interfaces cover job postings, applicant profiles and training data, each with its own terms of use to accept.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Job Market Finland
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Does Job Market Finland cost anything?
Which parts of the service use artificial intelligence?
Does the AI decide anything on my behalf?
Do I have to log in?
Is there a minimum age?
Which languages does the service support?
Is there an API?
What happens to a vacancy I publish?
How long are my conversations kept?
Who runs the service?
Should you pick Job Market Finland?
Job Market Finland is an unusual entry in an AI directory, and it is worth saying why. It is not a commercial product but the digital front door of a state employment service, and its artificial intelligence is a component of that platform rather than the thing being sold. That changes what can be judged: there is no pricing to compare, no vendor claims to discount, and no growth story.
What can be judged is the transparency, and it is genuinely above average. The publisher explains how the Skills Suggester compares free text against occupation descriptions, describes the matching calculation as an additive ensemble of search algorithms rather than a single black box, and states its failure modes in its own words: special requirements that cannot be represented, skills described in unexpected wording, missing keywords. Few commercial vendors publish that. The design also keeps a human in the loop where it matters, since the suggester proposes keywords and the person decides.
The gaps are documentary rather than functional. No hosting country, no subprocessor list, no security certification and no statement about whether customer data may feed model training. The terms of use still call the service a beta version, three years into production, which reads as a stale legal document rather than a real lifecycle signal. Anyone assessing the service should also register that every published vacancy leaves for the European EURES portal automatically.
For a job seeker, a recruiter or a caseworker in Finland, the value is straightforward and costs nothing. Outside that country the service is of interest mainly as a public-sector reference: a working demonstration that algorithmic matching can be deployed at national scale while being explained in public.
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