What 43 places across Europe and North America reveal about how talent attraction is being organised, what sits behind the public proposition, and where the function is heading next.
Talent attraction used to be relatively easy to identify: a campaign, a website, perhaps a relocation guide and a list of reasons why someone should move. The places examined for TPBOs 2026 special edition on Talent Attraction Leaders Europe & North America suggest the work has become considerably more complicated than that.
Across 43 initiatives, talent attraction is increasingly handled by economic development organisations, investment agencies, municipalities, universities and national governments, many of which were not originally created to attract people at all. Their primary responsibilities were investment, business growth, migration, education or regional development.
But as workforce availability has become part of the location decision, talent has moved closer to the centre of their work, and with it the whole character of the function has shifted from promoting a place to building the conditions around a talent decision. That shift is visible in seven ways.
1. Talent has entered the investment proposition
The clearest change is the growing connection between talent and investment attraction. Invest Ontario leads with STEM graduates, research institutions and post-secondary pipelines; Toronto Global uses workforce depth to demonstrate the capacity of the metropolitan economy; Waterloo EDC has developed a Tech Talent Calculator and AI talent mapping that let employers and site selectors examine the university pipeline rather than take the claim of talent availability on trust. The proposition is straightforward: the people a company needs are available here.
That changes who owns the work. In North America, investment and economic development organisations feature particularly strongly among the initiatives examined; in Europe, municipalities, universities and national governments appear more frequently to have taken responsibility. The institutional models differ, but the direction is the same, and talent is no longer treated as a separate communications task sitting at the edge of economic development.
In some places the boundaries between economic development, tourism and place branding are becoming less distinct as well. Winnipeg combines economic development and destination marketing within one organisation, Cleveland’s talent work sits within Destination Cleveland, and in Graubünden the regional brand is used beyond tourism through Enavant, with the canton and both tourism and non-tourism partners working within the same framework. All of which makes the organisational question more pressing:
Who is actually responsible for making a place’s talent proposition work?
2. The strongest propositions recruit for skills, not populations
The more concrete propositions in the cohort tend to start with a particular industry or skills base rather than an invitation to a vaguely defined pool of international talent. Denmark targets fields including Power-to-X, neuroscience, biosolutions, quantum, green technology, engineering, robotics and automation; WORK in AUSTRIA focuses on ICT, metal technology, electrical engineering and life sciences; Invest Vancouver has built employer-led accelerators around cybersecurity and medtech; Greater Sudbury is connecting its mining proposition to the emerging critical minerals economy; and Ontario leads with life sciences, advanced manufacturing, technology and critical minerals. As Kim van der Horst of Invest Ottawa puts it, talent attraction has become more targeted, with greater emphasis on niche, highly specialised and senior talent able to fill critical skills gaps.
A general claim about quality of life tells an employer very little about whether the people it needs are actually available. A proposition about quantum expertise, advanced manufacturing capacity or a specialised research ecosystem is easier to verify. That also changes the role of the place organisation, which now has to understand where demand exists, identify the relevant talent and help connect the two.
The question is becoming less “How do we attract talent?” and more “Which talent do we need, and what would make those people choose us?”
3. Behind the campaign sits a growing service infrastructure
Much of the most consequential work is invisible from the campaign itself. JobsOhio maintains a Workforce Toolkit, Talent Resource Guide, talent acquisition services, workforce grants and relocation incentives; Invest Vancouver combines employer interviews and Skills Needs Forums with a regional workforce data dashboard; Montréal International organises international recruitment missions and provides immigration guidance; Bizkaia Talent operates a talent network, talent map and headhunting support centre; Invest Ottawa provides job visibility, talent pooling, salary reporting and immigration resources; and WORK in AUSTRIA pairs its Talent Hub and Career Navigator with guidance on visa routes.
Some of the interventions are deliberately mundane, and that is rather the point. Utrecht provides employer checklists, Jacksonville’s Find Your JAX includes commute prediction and cost-of-living comparisons, and Scotland’s Migration Service provides one-to-one immigration appointments. None of these is likely to become the centrepiece of a destination campaign, yet they are precisely the things that determine whether interest becomes action. As Stéphane Paquet of Montréal International puts it, employers need clarity and reliable information to move recruitment processes forward with confidence.
Norrköping offers an especially clear example: its Bostadslöftet housing promise, developed with local landlords and Linköping University, addresses a practical obstacle faced by graduates, and rather than adding another message to the campaign, the city worked on the problem itself. This may be one of the most important shifts in the field.
The strongest talent propositions increasingly include services that make the proposition believable.
4. Different places are solving different bottlenecks
There is no single talent attraction problem. For some places the obstacle is visibility; for others it is recruitment; elsewhere the critical issue is immigration, housing, integration, professional networks or retention. Vilnius has brought migration, residence, employment, taxation, social insurance, healthcare and education support together through International House Vilnius; Uppsala International Hub combines practical support with career training; Utrecht International Center works on official procedures and spouse careers; Skellefteå operates a Welcome House with personal career guidance; and Scotland treats immigration navigation as a public service.
Elsewhere the emphasis sits much closer to the employer. Upstate SC Alliance packages the regional proposition for HR teams; Ohio, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montréal have developed services aimed directly at recruiters as well as prospective recruits; and Durham Region concentrates on connecting local talent with local employers.
The distinction tends to follow how responsibilities are divided: in many European cases migration and integration are public functions, so talent attraction becomes a front door into government services, while in many North American cases workforce development sits closer to economic development, so the service is built around employers and recruitment.
Those boundaries are not fixed, though. Halifax Partnership uses its Connector Program to treat professional network access as a retention issue, Move to Gothenburg combines employer infrastructure with settlement services, and Work in Estonia joins national attraction and employer support to the practical relocation services of International House of Estonia. The more useful question may therefore be:
Where is the talent journey most likely to break?
Is the place unknown to the workers it needs? Can an employer recruit them? Can a family manage the move? Can a newcomer build a professional network? And what happens after the first year?
5. Funding determines whether the work survives
Funding receives relatively little attention in public talent attraction material, yet it may determine more than the campaign does. Copenhagen Capacity faces the challenge of turning project-based funding into durable national alignment; Tulsa’s programme sits within a philanthropic foundation; Halifax combines federal immigration funding, provincial support and corporate partners; Brno’s expat service is jointly funded by the city, the South Moravian Region and employer partners; and Graubünden combines public funding with partner contributions.
The longer-term models look sturdier. Brainport Development operates within a triple-helix governance structure involving business, government and knowledge institutions, and Uppsala International Hub is a partnership between universities, Region Uppsala, the municipality and the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. Emilia-Romagna has gone further still: its it-ER programme, managed by ART-ER, is anchored in Regional Law 2/2023, giving talent attraction a statutory basis rather than leaving it dependent on an individual campaign or project cycle.
This matters because talent attraction is increasingly being asked to do something campaigns are not designed to do, which is to persist. A creative concept can be replaced in a season; it is the institutional and funding structure that determines whether the underlying capability remains.
6. Places are getting better at measuring activity than outcomes
One of the clearest limitations across the cases is measurement. It is relatively easy to report platform traffic, consultation volumes, partner numbers, campaign reach, employer participation and job-board activity, and much harder to show confirmed hires, completed relocations, first-year retention or what became of the people who left.
Some places are building more sophisticated systems. Invest Vancouver’s workforce dashboard draws on employer interviews and skills forums; GREATER MSP maintains a regional indicators dashboard; Bizkaia Talent maps its professional network; Cleveland combines perception research with graduate retention data; Graubünden measures advertising effectiveness annually; and Vilnius tracks expat satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores, comparing people who have used International House Vilnius with those who have not.
Even so, attribution remains difficult, because an employer makes the hiring decision, a household decides whether to stay, a university may build the pathway and a migration service may solve the administrative problem, and the organisation that helped at one stage may never learn what happened at the end. As Indrė Laučienė of International House Vilnius puts it, surveys can capture the worries people arrive with without necessarily showing what happens to those who stay and try.
That leaves an uncomfortable conclusion:
Many places have become better at running talent programmes than at demonstrating what those programmes produce.
7. The talent function is expanding, but its influence still ends somewhere
Read together, the 43 cases show how far talent attraction has moved beyond communications. The function now sits with organisations that have a direct stake in economic performance, migration, education or place attractiveness; it targets specific sectors; it involves data teams, employer services, immigration desks, relocation support and settlement centres; and in one case it has a statutory basis.
But the institutional chain does not extend indefinitely. An agency can identify a skills shortage, an employer can make the offer, a university can build the pathway, a ministry can issue the visa, and a welcome centre can help a family register and find housing. Then the decision that matters most belongs to no single programme, because someone has to decide whether they actually want to stay.
That decision is shaped by work, housing, schools, relationships, culture, professional networks, belonging and the ordinary experience of living somewhere, and it rarely answers to one organisation or one KPI. It is where the current generation of talent attraction initiatives reaches its boundary, and arguably where the next generation of place branding begins. As Dan Rosenberg of Copenhagen Capacity puts it, the places that succeed will be those that understand talent attraction does not end with the job offer.
From attraction to a system
The 43 cases do not point towards one model of talent attraction. They point towards a change in what the function is expected to do. Where it was once enough to make a place visible to people who might move there, the work now involves making the labour market understandable, helping employers recruit, navigating immigration, solving practical barriers, connecting newcomers to professional networks and creating the conditions in which people might choose to stay.
That is a much larger brief, and it explains why the most interesting initiatives are increasingly hard to classify: they sit somewhere between economic development, investment promotion, migration policy, employer support, place branding and public service delivery.
The campaign is still there, but it is no longer the whole proposition. The emerging competitive advantage may lie in what sits behind it.
This article draws on the talent attraction cases assembled for TPBOs forthcoming special edition on Talent Attraction Leaders in Europe & North America 2026, using organisational material, programme documentation and public reporting. We looked particularly at who holds the mandate, how the work is funded, and what has been built around the public proposition.
