Tent Sverige Launches with 25 Companies Committed to Help People with a Refugee Background Access the Swedish Labor Market

• Leading businesses – including some of the country’s largest employers such as Ambea, ESS Group, Food Folk / McDonald’s Sweden, ManpowerGroup, Nobina, and Tetra Pak – have come together as inaugural members of Tent Sverige to advance their efforts to hire refugees across all skill levels

Stockholm, October 8, 2025 – The Tent Partnership for Refugees (Tent) is announcing the launch of Tent Sverige, a coalition of 25 companies in Sweden committed to helping those with a refugee background access jobs and rebuild their lives. The launch comes at a critical time for Sweden, where labor shortages are intensifying and the need for long-term talent solutions is more urgent than ever.

While unemployment remains a challenge in Sweden, 76 percent of Swedish employers still struggle to find candidates with the right skills – nearly double the figure from a decade ago. The growing mismatch between available talent and labor market needs has become more pronounced over the last decade and puts pressure on Sweden’s long-term competitiveness. An aging population and declining birth rates have dramatically slowed the growth of Sweden’s working-age population. According to SKR, while the number of people aged 25–60 grew by 455,000 between 2013 and 2023, it’s expected to increase by just 13,000 in the next decade.

The Swedish government’s recent 2026 budget proposal underlines the urgency of these challenges, with proposed measures to strengthen education, improve job matching, and encourage more companies to create more jobs. The launch of Tent Sverige can complement these efforts, by mobilising major employers to support the labor market integration of refugees. 

“Welcoming and integrating people with a refugee background is not just the right thing to do – it’s a business and economic necessity,” said Karin Heri, Director of Tent Sverige. “Employers can no longer afford to overlook the qualified talent that already exists in Sweden. The companies that expand their talent pipelines and hire people with a refugee background – who are ready and eager to work and bring such a variety of skills and expertise – will be better positioned to succeed in the future economy.”

Sweden currently hosts over 170,000 refugees, many of whom come from countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Ukraine. Despite having the legal right to work, refugees often face persistent barriers to employment – including limited Swedish language skills, lack of social and professional networks, challenges getting qualifications recognized, and unfamiliarity with the Swedish workplace. As a consequence, many refugees struggle to access the Swedish labor market: while there isn’t a specific figure for refugee unemployment, that of “foreign-born people” is practically double that of the general unemployment rate (15% vs. 8.5%).

“The hospitality sector presents the great advantage of attracting and welcoming a wide diversity of people,” said Johanna Dahlsjö Henriksson, Chief Sustainability Officer at ESS Group. “This gives us a broad expertise, and our goal at ESS Group is that our employees want to further develop their skills with us. By hiring employees with a refugee background, we have, in recent years, gained valuable team members – some of whom now even speak the Scanian dialect better than I do myself. We have seen the difference employment has made for them, as an important step toward greater social cohesion. Tent has helped us succeed in this.”

Tent Sverige will support its member companies, free-of-charge, to tackle these challenges and fill their labor gaps through a comprehensive set of services, including:

• Localized resources and trainings for human resource teams; 
• Best practices and ideas distilled from Tent’s network of hundreds of major companies across a dozen countries who are hiring and integrating refugees into their workforces, as well as tailored programs and insights to the Swedish market context; 
• Regular convenings and workshops with other Tent Sverige member companies for peer-to-peer learning; 
• Introductions to best-in-class partners across Sweden that can help source refugee talent.

The inaugural member companies of Tent Sverige stepping up to integrate people with refugee background into the local workforce represent many of the largest employers in the country, from major Swedish employers to the biggest international brands, including: Accenture, Adecco Group, Ambea, Axel Johnson, Axfood, Duni Group, ESS Hotel Group, Food Folk / McDonald’s, Grant Thornton, Heimstaden, Inditex, ISS, LinkedIn, ManpowerGroup, Nestlé, Nobina, Pfizer, Pwc, Randstad, Skanska, Sodexo, Sofidel, Tata Consultancy Services, Tetra Pak, Wolt.

The launch of Tent Sverige is part of Tent’s broader effort to mobilize the global business community to support refugees through employment. With similar coalitions established in countries such as  Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the U.S., Tent is helping employers unlock the power of refugee talent – proving that what’s good for refugees is also good for business and the economy. 

About Tent Sverige

With Sweden welcoming significant numbers of refugees, businesses have a critical role to play in helping them integrate economically in their new communities. Tent Sverige is a network of 25 major companies that are committed to hiring refugees across the country and helping them become job-ready. Tent Sverige is the national coalition of the Tent Partnership for Refugees, which was founded in 2016 by Hamdi Ulukaya, the CEO and founder of Chobani – a multibillion dollar food company in the U.S. – to mobilize the world’s largest employers to help refugees access local labor markets. In addition to the United States, Tent operates in a dozen countries across the Americas and Europe. Find out more at www.tent.org/sverige.