Hiring refugees: What’s the human responsibility and business case?

“I still remember seeing him for the first time in the cafeteria at ENGIE, France’s largest gas and electricity provider. I had just arrived from Afghanistan a few months ago and barely spoke French.”

Farah, a young Afghani woman, expresses herself in immaculate Parisian French and the professionalism of a seasoned HR professional.

“I desperately wanted to pursue a meaningful work in Paris, but I didn’t know how to start. I felt lucky just to be safe, having literally taken the last flight out when the Taliban stormed my hometown.

Bruce became my mentor and exposed me to the world of HR. He changed my life. Today I am proud to be working as an intern at Siemens and pursuing my Masters in HR.”

“From the moment I met Farah, I knew she was a special woman,” chimes in Bruce Roch, Farah’s mentor, the Global Head of Diversity at Adecco.

“Despite her tragic history, she was curious, eager to learn, took initiative, even when this required great courage in an unfamiliar country and culture. I’m so proud of her.”

This success story and many others are made possible thanks to Adecco’s CEO Christophe Catoir who committed to hiring 85,000 and upskilling 17,000 refugees between 2022 and 2027.

Adecco is on track to make this vision a reality, one refugee at a time, thanks to their partnership with the Tent Partnership for Refugees, a non-profit founded by Hamdi Ulukaya, the CEO and founder of Chobani – a U.S. food company valued at $20 billion.

Since launching in 2016, Tent has mobilized over 500 of the world’s largest employers to integrate refugees into the workforce, across 11 countries in Europe and the Americas.

The business case for hiring refugees

“When Hamdi realized refugees were being excluded from work, he decided to act. As a businessperson, Hamdi saw not only an opportunity to have a social human impact, but also a strong business case and downstream benefits to the local community,” explains Jen Stobart, Director of Tent UK, the national coalition of Tent which brings together 80+ companies in the UK.

The business case for hiring and intentionally integrating refugees is compelling.

They include higher retention, engagement and productivity, solving for talent shortages across all levels of the organization, increased innovation, positive economic impact through greater consumer spending, new businesses and increased foreign investment.

Let’s dig in deeper.

1. Higher retention, engagement and productivity

97% of hiring managers who have hired refugees would do so again, citing reasons like creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction.

According to Equal Reach, refugees bring valuable skills and proven experience, fresh global perspectives, and a positive boost to company culture.

Also, when finally given a chance, their drive and determination to succeed is unmatched, even if they have to start over in their careers.

“Companies who take intentional actions to reduce barriers to refugees finding jobs and integrating into their new environment experience higher retention rates and employer morale,” Stobart echoes this based on Tent’s experience across hundreds of organizations.

2. Solving critical talent shortages

Refugees not only make great employees; they are also the solution to a shrinking workforce and ever-increasing talent shortages.

An estimated 20 million jobs will go unfilled globally by 2030, translating to $8.5 trillion in lost revenue, according to Korn Ferry.

With European and the US birthrates dipping below the 2.1 level at which a population remains stable and trending downward from their current 1.4 and 1.89 respectively, many developed countries are already struggling to source talent gaps without tapping into diverse candidate pools.

Europe faces critical workforce shortages in sectors including STEM, healthcare, transportation, hospitality and construction to name a few.

Fortunately, immigrants are increasingly bridging these gaps.

In Germany, 67% of construction and drywall workers, 46% percent of bus and tram drivers, and 31% of elder caregivers are immigrants.

Migrant employment increased by 50% and 15% in IT & Communications and Healthcare respectively between 2019 and 2022.

A report by the labor market analytics firm Lightcast found that the joint forces of baby boomers retiring and shrinking demographics will create a deficit of 6 million workers in the US by 2032.

“By 2035, immigrants and their children are projected to be the sole source of US workforce growth.” says Mary Lee, National Director of Employer Engagement at Upwardly Global.

Upwardly Global is a non-profit responsible for helping 11,500 refugees and work-authorized immigrants with international credentials restart their careers in the US over the past 25 years.

3. Highly experienced and educated Talent

“People often think of immigrants as only being qualified for low-level jobs, which contributes to the biases that we’re working to overcome at Upwardly Global,” continues Lee.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, 35% of all 42.2 million immigrant adults ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2023, a rate similar to that of US-born adults.

Newer arrivals tend to be better educated; 46% of immigrants who entered the country between 2020 and 2023 held at least a bachelor’s degree.

4. Economic growth

Unfortunately, millions of highly educated immigrants with in-demand professional credentials get stuck working in survival jobs because of the challenges they face navigating the job market.

A surgeon working in a slaughterhouse, a university professor pumping gas at night, an electrical chemical engineer driving a garbage truck.

A sad reality both in the US and in Europe, where college-educated immigrants are about two times as likely to be unemployed and overqualified for their jobs.

According to a 2024 Lighthouse Report, European economies could grow by 33.8 billion euros or 0.36% of annual GDP, if immigrants were employed at the levels equivalent to their former experience and thereby earned the same as natives.

4. Increased innovation, consumer spending, and foreign investment

“Immigrants not only help solve critical talent shortages and boost consumer spending when employed at their level of experience, they also disproportionately contribute to  innovation, with 36% of patents attributed to them in the United States,” comments Zeke Hernandez, Wharton professor, leading authority on immigration and author of The Truth about Immigration.

Immigrants create new economies of people who invent, sell and buy goods, attract higher levels of foreign investment.

Learning from employers with successful refugee programs

“Beyond the business case, it’s important to remember that every refugee is a human being; every refugee has a personal story”, says Roch.

Businesses have both the opportunity and the responsibility to welcome our fellow human beings, many of whom have faced extreme violence and trauma.”

An increasing number of organizations, including the 500+ members of Tent, are taking refugee hiring and integration seriously and experiencing the benefits: L’Oreal, Volvo, Novartis, PepsiCo, Randstad, Accenture, Adecco, Pret a Manger, to name a few.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Pret a Manger launched their Ukrainian Employment Programme, which offers refugees arriving in the UK financial aid, mental health support and English language tuition alongside job opportunities.

They focus primarily on women whose partners and families remain in Ukraine through their charity arm, The Pret Foundation. To date, Pret has hired and advanced over 250 Ukrainian refugees.

Novartis has committed to hiring at least 150 refugees and training at least 150 refugees globally over the next three years.

The company’s Refugee Program helps refugees overcome barriers to accessing jobs – including low language proficiency; poor access to transportation, healthcare or even food; and limited social and professional networks.

Programs go beyond hiring and upskilling to include assigned buddies who walk side by side along refugees, both inside and outside Novartis, to ensure their career success and advancement.

If you are an employer looking to start or expand a refugee program in your organization, here are some practical tips.

1. Start small

“It’s OK to start small,” says Jolie den Boer, Global Director of Recruitment at Booking.com.

The travel technology giant offers 16 hours of paid volunteer time to employees who mentor underrepresented groups, including refugees. To date, 198 volunteers have supported 396 job seekers to find meaningful work across 60+ employers.

If you have little to no experience in hiring refugees, consider a hiring pilot that enables a few refugees to access open vacancies or a mentorship pilot where you pair volunteers with refugees in your local community.

2. Be intentional and commit to start

It’s important to be intentional about hiring people, as well as understanding and tackling the barriers they face.

This will likely require a small upfront investment to adapt hiring processes like training staff to engage with refugees, posting jobs and offering interviews in the target language of refugee communities, recognizing foreign qualifications and experiences, and removing bias from ATS systems.

3. Think beyond hiring

Hiring is just the beginning. Ensuring an inclusive onboarding process and equipping people in the organization to make refugees feel welcome so they can thrive in the workplace is just as important.

Assigning a buddy who will help answer questions about work practices, the local culture and practice the language with new hires is a great way to start.

4. Build to scale

When Adecco launched a first small pilot with UNHCR in 2008, the company had no idea that their efforts would scale to today’s commitment of hiring 85,000 refugees.

Getting there required them to establish a formal program, demonstrate impact to secure funding, align processes to scale their efforts and impact, and ultimately get the full sponsorship of executive leadership.

A tailwind to scaling is that once employers make a commitment to hiring one refugee group, they generally become more adept at integrating new groups of refugees as well as other employees from different kinds of backgrounds.

5. Leverage AI

“To better recognize foreign-born talent, recruiters are looking for a holistic approach that pairs AI innovations with human engagement. Alongside AI-enabled search tools, Upwardly Global offers strategic engagement opportunities and resources,” according to Upwardly Global’s Lee.

While the organization continues to offer personalized coaching to candidates, they recently expanded their high-touch approach with Upwardly Global Fetch, a tool for Workday’s HiredScore AI for Recruiting.

The integration gives recruiters seamless access to Upwardly Global’s talent alongside their existing candidate sources, thereby expanding and diversifying their talent pipelines without altering their workflow.

This and other platforms like Jobs for Humanity’s Refugee.jobs drives a higher volume of quality skill-based candidate matches, while removing the bias which often prevents diverse, yet qualified candidates, and potential employers to connect.

6. Don’t go it alone

Wherever you are on your refugee program journey, know that there is a community of other organizations who have gone before you.

This is particularly important in the current economic climate where one in eight companies have scaled back diversity and inclusion efforts.

Tent does an excellent job at connecting employers at a national level so organizations can learn from each other within the context of their own unique economic and demographic environment.

The non-profit helps major employers around the world, free of charge, kickstart and further advance their refugee hiring efforts, connecting them with refugee talent across the country.

Upwardly Global helps immigrants, refugees, and asylees with professional credentials restart their careers in the US and has recently launched a program for Ukrainian refugees in Poland. They partner with corporations to apply a skills-first approach to building a strong, inclusive workforce.

Platforms like Refugee.jobs use AI to match candidates to roles based on skills and experience, helping employers uncover high-potential talent they might otherwise overlook.

By reducing bias in the screening process, these tools increase access to underrepresented candidates and enable organizations to build more diverse teams.

On the candidate side, job seekers receive a free agentic AI course to enable them to learn how to use AI to build apps that make them more productive.

7. Participate in the IIQ pilot and join us at UNLEASH America in Las Vegas

Booking.com’s den Boer, Adecco’s Roch and myself hosted a boardroom at UNLEASH World 2025 on untapped talent pools.

Stay tuned for UNLEASH America, March 17-19 2026, where we will convene leading employers with innovative refugee programs to share their successes, lessons learned and tips on getting started.

I will also unveil the Immigration Integration Quotient ®(IIQ), a new assessment tool which enables employers to assess their readiness for integrating refugees across 10 leading practices and provides insight on how to get started or how to evolve their programs to the next level.

If you are interested in participating in the IIQ pilot, please contact Elisabeth Gegner at elisabethgegner@potentialyze.com.