Organizations’ hiring processes are increasingly shaped by various digital tools and e-recruitment systems. However, there is little understanding of the recruiters’ needs for and expectations towards new systems. This paper investigates recruitment chatbots as an emergent form of e-recruitment, offering a low-threshold channel for recruiter-applicant interaction. The rapid spread of chatbots and the casual nature of their user interfaces raise questions about the perceived benefits, risks, and suitable roles in this sensitive application area. To this end, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews, including 11 interviews with people who are utilizing recruitment chatbots and two people from companies that are developing recruitment chatbots. The findings provide a qualitative account of their expectations and motivations, early experiences, and perceived opportunities regarding the current and future use of chatbots in recruitment. While chatbots answer the need for attracting new candidates, they have also introduced new challenges and work tasks for the recruiters. The paper offers considerations that can help to redesign recruitment bots from the recruiter’s viewpoint.

Post-industrial society has witnessed trends according to which the labour market has become more flexible, services have expanded and immaterial work and horizontal work organisation has emerged, shaping professions in respect to the employment and work they can offer. An outcome of these trends is a portfolio career, an employment pattern based on holding down multiple jobs, which increases the variation in the quality of career trajectories. Portfolio careers, however, are shaped at the intersection of industry and profession. This article studies the quality of a professional portfolio career by investigating the employment pattern and the task profile. Two case studies, one involving business consulting professionals and the other professionals in the creative industry, are investigated. The study is based on the analysis of interview data. For both professional groups, the quality of employment was impaired by the insecurity inherent in a portfolio career, but the quality of the professional profile of tasks was relatively adequate. For the consulting professionals studied, the quality of the task profile is due to the coherent but multidisciplinary continuum of tasks, which in turn is due to the market-based service industry. For the professionals in the creative industry, the profile consisted of professional tasks and tasks external to the profession, which is due to underemployment in the industry.

In Finland, doctoral employment outside the academy has been increasing. Universities can no longer absorb the numbers in the doctoral labour force and research and development (R&D) policy emphasises the need for specialised research capacity in non-academic sectors; the highest academic degree is assumed to add value. However, the transition from doctoral programmes to employment outside the academy has been limited due to the social dynamics within labour markets. This article explores the careers of doctorate holders and the motives non-academic organisations have for recruiting such graduates. The data come from a survey of doctorate holders (N = 1183) and interviews with 26 employers. Based on the analysis, there was little place for doctorate holders outside the academy, except in R&D roles. When employed to undertake work outside R&D, they carried out special, demanding tasks or had a particular role related to their academic status. Professional functions such as those undertaken by medical doctors, engineers and teachers were the most common, but career patterns varied from one employment sector to the next. Employers considered industry-specific competence to be important, and the status of the doctoral degree and the membership in the academic community were expected to advance collaboration with universities and enhance the professional status of the organisations that hired doctoral graduates.

In Finland, quality assurance related to the Bologna process has been adapted to existing systems of higher education at the national level and a form of implementation is also recognised at the level of the higher education institution. In universities, varied outcomes of quality assurance are based on interaction of organisational structures, management styles and academic cultures. Quality assurance generates direct impacts, which are intended reactions to the audit process and unintended outcomes: transparency, learning, enhanced status of work and social integration, as well as excess work‐load and insignificant benefits at the grass‐root level. Indirect impacts only emerge when intertwined with other processes, motives, actors, relations and pressures. The structures and management of an organisation and culture and position of individual disciplines influence the outcomes of quality assurance. A flat organisational model promotes participation of personnel in the quality assurance work. In addition, the culture and position of a particular discipline affects implementation and outcomes of quality assurance.

The purpose of the article is to problematize the relationship between the Nordic democratic public higher education tradition and transnational market-driven knowledge economy policies. The article illustrates this development with two cases: quality assurance and internationalization policies, where external demands, based mostly on market ideologies, have been introduced with apparently transnational incentives but having national implementations. These transnational pressures are related to a kind of soft governance of higher education policy, characterized by networked decision-making and use of expert consultants, which possibly promotes flexible decision-making and efficiency, but may simultaneously produce adverse outcomes to transparent and democratic decision-making.

The organization of working times and workplaces has typically been diverse and hybrid for people working in culture. Work is characterized by precarious conditions such as short-term contracts and seasonal employment. The impact of COVID-19 has shown the vulnerability and uniqueness of the employment conditions in this sector. We collected personal written texts from people working in the cultural sector in spring 2020, when in Finland the first wave of COVID-19 was subsiding and nobody knew when the next wave would come. We analyzed the ways cultural workers constructed agency on temporal and relational dimensions as regards work and non-work. The content analytic approach highlighted two main types of situational agencies, the normative employment agency and the precarious work agency, both of which were shaped by the uncertain conditions of the cultural sector. Due to the differing employment conditions, both intensification of work and small agency were present in work of the cultural sector and posed challenges to the management of time and the future. However, the terms and conditions for agency construction varied, even under similar circumstances.