Indrė Laučienė is Head of International House Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital city’s one-stop centre for international talent. Established by Go Vilnius in 2021, IHV brings relocation, employment, tax, social insurance and integration services together in one place, helping newcomers and their families navigate the first steps of living and working in Vilnius.
Since joining in early 2024, Indrė has helped move the city’s approach beyond post-arrival support toward a more connected talent journey, one that links attraction, relocation, integration, career development and long-term retention. That thinking is now embedded in Go Vilnius’s dedicated Foreign Talent Department, established in autumn 2025, with IHV as its operational core.
In this conversation, she reflects on how Vilnius positions itself for international talent, the gap between perception and lived outcome, and the connective work a city needs to do beyond promotion.
International House Vilnius started as a practical relocation and integration centre. How has your role evolved as Vilnius moves from helping international talent settle to actively shaping who chooses the city in the first place?
When I joined IHV in early 2024, the organisation was already well established on the operational side, relocation services, institutional partnerships, a genuine one-stop shop for paperwork. My role back then was mostly about making that machinery run smoothly.
A few moments changed how I saw the job. I once asked a newly arrived professional from Brazil why he’d chosen Vilnius, expecting to hear about a company or a campaign. Instead, he told me he’d spent weeks reading stories from Brazilians already living here, strangers who gave him the confidence to move. Around the same time, I learned that only 7–9% of international students stay in Vilnius after graduation, despite years of investment in educating them. And at one of our career events, I kept hearing the same sentence: “I like living in Vilnius, I just don’t know how to build my career here.”
Those three moments were really one message: attraction, relocation, integration and retention aren’t separate boxes, they’re one continuous journey, and every stage shapes the next.
That thinking is exactly why, in autumn 2025, Go Vilnius established a dedicated Foreign Talent Department. IHV remains its operational core, the place where people still get relocation, migration, tax and social-insurance support under one roof, but it’s now one part of a much bigger mandate that also covers talent marketing and attraction, data and research, career pathways for students, and employer engagement, all working from one strategy instead of several disconnected ones.
My own role changed with it: I’m no longer only asking how we support people who’ve already chosen Vilnius, I’m asking how we help shape who considers the city in the first place, and make sure staying never feels like a wrong decision.
Vilnius is now positioning itself more deliberately as a city for international talent. What do you see as the city’s strongest advantages and where is the perception gap still largest?
Our strongest advantage isn’t really debated once people are here, our own research keeps showing that quality of life and the visual appeal of the city are what foreigners rate highest about Vilnius. And the people who go through IHV rate the city as a place to live and work noticeably better than those who don’t, roughly 20–25 points higher on our recommendation index. So the service experience itself works.
The gap is elsewhere: only around a quarter of foreigners in Vilnius would actively recommend it to a friend, and younger respondents, exactly the segment we most want to keep, rate the city lower than older ones. The most frequently mentioned weakness in our surveys is “limited career and employment opportunities.”
But here’s what’s interesting: when we actually look at outcomes rather than perception, that worry doesn’t hold up well. Lithuania’s ICT workforce alone grew by roughly two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, and that kind of growth constantly creates senior roles that didn’t exist a few years earlier. We’ve heard directly from professionals who moved here as developers and became technology strategists within a handful of years and several promotions, not a decade. In a smaller, fast-growing market, there are simply fewer people ahead of you in the queue.
So the real perception gap isn’t “is Vilnius liveable.” People already believe that. And it isn’t even “can I build a career here” in the way people assume, because the honest answer is: often faster than in a bigger, more saturated capital. The gap is that almost nobody arrives already knowing that.
International benchmarks back the general direction too, Lithuania scores very well on ease of hiring and on growing talent, but that reputation hasn’t yet reached the people actually deciding whether to move.
Many cities promote quality of life, affordability and career opportunity. From your perspective, what does Vilnius need to communicate more clearly to stand out from other European talent destinations?
Every mid-sized European city is telling talent the same story right now, quality of life, affordability, career opportunity. Repeating that list louder doesn’t differentiate us. What does is being honest about what kind of city we actually are: not the biggest, not the one with the biggest marketing budget, but the one where there’s less friction, fewer institutions to navigate, faster decisions, a genuinely single point of contact instead of five separate ones.
Concretely, that means leading with things people don’t yet know: that Lithuania ranks fourth in Europe by EU Blue Card holders, even though almost nobody, employers included, knows what that status actually gives them. It also means saying, clearly and with numbers behind it, that career progression here tends to be fast: our ICT workforce grew by roughly two-thirds in just four years, and that pace keeps creating management and senior roles faster than a stable, saturated market ever would.
That’s not a marketing claim, it’s arithmetic, fewer experienced people ahead of you, more new senior positions being created than there are people to fill them. Almost no other European capital can say that as honestly right now, and we say it far too quietly.
It also means being upfront that this is a place still building its playbook for international talent rather than one with decades of migration-policy experience, and turning that into a strength: we’re building fast, and we listen. And increasingly it means showing up clearly not just to people, but to the AI systems more and more people now use as their first source of information about a city. Our message has to be findable there too, not only on our own website.
Your work shows that relocation, integration and retention are closely connected. Where do newcomers most often need support after arrival, and what does that reveal about the real barriers to staying long term?
The pattern of what people ask us has stayed fairly consistent over the years. Housing comes first, the local rental and buying market is genuinely confusing if you don’t know it. Then migration paperwork, declaring a place of residence, registering kids for school. The language barrier runs underneath all of it, because most official information still exists only in Lithuanian. Once people are settled, the questions shift to everyday systems, taxes, benefits, opening a business.
What that reveals about long-term retention is something different, though. Getting through that list well, and our satisfaction data shows we generally do, solves the settling in problem. It doesn’t solve the staying problem. What we hear once people are past that first stage is almost always some version of “I like living here, I just don’t know how to build my career here.”
I want to be precise about what that sentence actually means, though, because it’s easy to hear it as “Vilnius lacks career opportunity,” and that’s not what the evidence shows. What we see, including directly from people who’ve built real careers here, is that promotion often comes faster than people expect: a market this size, growing this quickly, keeps creating senior roles faster than it can fill them internally, so a good professional can move up in years rather than a decade. The barrier isn’t the opportunity, it’s that nobody tells people this before they arrive, so they spend their first year assuming the worst instead of pursuing it.
Integration isn’t where the journey ends, it’s where retention actually begins, and that’s the piece we’re now investing in far more deliberately: career consultations, exit interviews to understand who leaves and why, and clearer pathways, and clearer messaging, from arrival into an actual career.
International students are becoming a key focus for Vilnius. Why are they such an important talent group, and what needs to change so that more students can move from studying in Vilnius to building careers there?
Because we’ve been looking at them through too narrow a lens. They’re not just students, they’re one of the city’s strongest future talent pools, and right now we lose most of them: only 7–9% stay in Vilnius after graduation. That’s not a graduate problem, that’s future entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and healthcare professionals leaving before we ever benefit from having trained them.
What needs to change is the bridge between graduation and employment, which today barely exists in any structured way. That’s exactly what our Pathway Programme pilot is testing this autumn, pairing third-year bachelor’s and first-year master’s students with mentors already working in Vilnius, in sectors like fintech, ICT and biotech, alongside career consultations, CV workshops and a real internship, not just a lecture. Universities nominate students, businesses commit to at least a couple of touchpoints and get early access to a motivated talent pool, students get a structured path instead of guessing. It’s a pilot, deliberately small, but it’s the foundation for what we eventually want: an ecosystem, not a one-off event.
And the timing genuinely works in students’ favour: Lithuania’s ICT workforce alone grew by roughly two-thirds in just four years, which means graduates who do stay aren’t just filling entry-level slots, they’re stepping into roles, and often promotions, almost as fast as the market can create them. That’s a very different story from “stay and hope something opens up,” and it’s one we need to tell before graduation, not after.
This autumn we’re also launching our first international student-attraction campaign, because the story doesn’t start at graduation, it starts with why a student chooses to study here at all.
International House Vilnius uses data, client feedback and surveys to understand what foreign residents experience in the city. What have these insights taught you about Vilnius’ strengths, weaknesses and blind spots as a place to live and work?
The data keeps pointing us toward the same place. Our own client survey shows people who reach IHV are genuinely well served, willingness to help, politeness and empathy rated 9.24 out of 10, most issues fully resolved. Awareness of IHV itself is growing too, up from 38% to 49% of foreign residents in a year. So the service layer isn’t the weak point.
The wider annual research tells a different story: overall city satisfaction sits at 7.3 out of 10, recovering, but still below where it stood a few years ago, and the recommendation index is still negative, with “limited career opportunities” as the most cited concern. Put those two things side by side and the real blind spot becomes visible: it’s not that our services fail people, and, importantly, it’s not even that the career opportunity is actually missing. When we talk to people who’ve stayed and built real careers here, the story is usually the opposite of the survey headline: faster promotions, more responsibility sooner, because the market is small and growing quickly. The survey captures a worry people arrive with; it doesn’t capture what actually happens to the people who stay and try.
That gap between perception and lived outcome is exactly the kind of thing a single satisfaction score will never show you, which is why we’re investing in a shared data ecosystem rather than isolated surveys, bringing IHV service data, the annual RAIT research and our own expat survey into one place, with AI helping us spot the connections a single dashboard would miss, like this one. The goal isn’t just to report what changed, but to understand why, and act on it faster. In this case, that means saying the career story out loud, earlier, instead of letting people assume the worst.
What are the biggest challenges for Vilnius’ talent strategy over the next few years, whether around employers, regulation, integration, public perception or international visibility?
A few, and they’re layered.
On regulation: Lithuania is actually strong on paper, fourth in Europe for Blue Card holders, but almost nobody, including employers, knows what that status offers, so a real advantage sits unused.
On employers: more than three-quarters of employers worldwide already report difficulty finding specialists, especially in ICT, engineering and health sciences, so the competition for the same people is only intensifying, and we still need to do more to connect local employers with the international talent already in the city, not just the talent abroad. There’s a communication challenge sitting right under all of this, too: our own growth numbers already prove that people can build a career here fast, but that story isn’t reaching candidates before they decide whether to come, so we keep competing on affordability and lifestyle alone, when speed of career growth is actually one of our strongest, least-used arguments.
On integration: the risk we watch for is “bubble formation”: communities settling in alongside the city rather than into it, which is part of why we’ve deliberately shifted our community events from representing separate groups to one shared celebration everyone organises together.
On public perception: our own satisfaction numbers dipped in recent years alongside a broader, and at times difficult, public debate here at home about integration requirements for foreign residents, a reminder that talent strategy isn’t only an external marketing exercise, it also depends on domestic public sentiment.
And on visibility: connectivity is still a real constraint, direct flight options from our priority markets remain limited, and increasingly we’re competing not just for people’s attention, but for visibility inside the AI systems that are becoming many people’s first stop for information about a city.
Looking ahead, what do you think will separate the places that succeed in talent attraction from those that struggle? And what role should cities play beyond promotion?
It won’t be budget size, every city chasing this talent pool can outspend a smaller player like us on advertising. What separates the ones that succeed is clarity and speed: a smaller system with less friction, faster decisions and, because of that, more actual impact per euro spent. Vilnius’s answer to global competition was never going to be a bigger campaign; it’s a clearer position and fewer places where a good candidate gets stuck.
Beyond promotion, I think a city’s real job is building the connective tissue that a single campaign can’t: a genuine one-stop shop instead of five institutions, a data ecosystem that lets us actually see what’s working instead of guessing, and a structured path from “interested in studying here” to “building a career here”, universities, employers and the city working from one shared strategy instead of four separate ones.
That’s a harder thing to build than a good advert, and it’s also much harder for a competitor to copy.
Thank you, Indrė.
To explore further, connect with Indrė Laučienė on LinkedIn, or visit GoVilnius.lt to connect with the team. Curious about the Lithuanian capital? See our Vilnius city showcase.
