Sweden: Non-EU citizen gets a job via Linkedin & gets deported

In the radio news in Sweden today there's the sad story of Syed Latif from Bangladesh who came to Sweden to study Economics in Östersund. When he graduated he began looking for work, and via Linkedin he found a job at an exchange office in Malmö, and moved there. Now he is being deported from Sweden, because the job ad wasn't posted so that "all EU citizens could find the help wanted ad".

According to the Migration Court in Sweden, Syed Latif failed to prove that the job he applied for and got was visible to everyone in the EU. To follow EU law & regulations, this is one of the requirements for a non-EU citizen to obtain a work permit in Sweden. Had the job ad been advertised on the Swedish Arbetsförmedlingen (Employment Service) site, it would have been okay, as these ads are also searchable in the European job portal EURES and is thus visible to all EU citizens looking for work.

The judgment states that Syed Latif has "not shown" any support for the service he had been visible to residents throughout the EU / EEA and Switzerland, and adds "to simply say that this is the case is not enough." Lawyer Carl-Owe Olsson believes that the job brokering the site is visible to EU citizens.

- "If Linkedin isn't good enough, then what other options are available? You can always argue that access to computers and so on, may exclude some job seekers from some ads, but to take advantage of the EURES job search site you must also have access to a computer basically so there is not much difference there, I think."

The lawyer adds: - "We have tried to prove what LinkedIn is and how large the user base is, and mainly in Europe, because that is the crux of the matter, and the court has simply not accepted this."

Since Linkedin seems to be in a slightly confused state morphing between a Resume-depository, tumblr-lite blog, and meme-posting extravaganza right now, competitor job boards like Monster.com could do well to strike deals with the EURES board to cross-post want ads. Ironically the EURES board is temporarily down, again, which happens on a regular basis. Either way, it's bad PR for Linkedin's job board efforts to see that getting a job via Linkedin breaks EU law.