Building an EU Talent Pool
A New Approach to Migration Management for Europe

How can the European Union become more attractive for talented professionals looking for job opportunities worldwide? Can EU-level action support employers, private and public stakeholders in each Member State to better leverage international recruitment into the Single Market? This report presents a new overview of the obstacles that continue to hamper the attraction and recruitment of skills from outside Europe, and discusses the role of both public and private initiatives to help overcome these barriers. It provides a comparative analysis of the Expression of Interest (EoI) system of migration management as implemented in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and assesses its potential to address the needs of the European labour migration system. The report presents several options and variants for adapting the EoI, step by step and EU-wide, and examines their feasibility, constraints and advantages.
Foreword
The European Union is punching below its weight in the global competition for talent. According to the Database on Immigrants in OECD countries (DIOC), only one in four highly-educated migrants residing in the OECD in 2015‑16 had chosen an EU destination, while almost two out of three had chosen to settle in North America or Oceania.