My name is Anna Leinder and I've founded a startup company called Diretto Employment Services. The objective of the company is to facilitate for private individuals to become responsible employers in order to create more jobs and promote integration. My idea has won the City of Stockholm's price for innovation in the sustainability category.

I came up with the idea because I'm not very good at cooking. I worked as a CEO in a North American group of companies with responsibility for what the americans called "rest of the world". It was a lot of work and a lot of travel. My husband took care of everything at home but sometimes he also had to travel too and then I had to cook. The result was not very good. My children and I were unhappy. So I posted an add to look for help and I got 250 applicants. I employed a guy who was refugee from Syria. He came to our place and in 5 hours he cooked all the food we needed for the entire week. It was fantastic.

Friends and neighbours wanted to do the same thing but when I explained to them what to do in order for a private individual to become an employer and to things by the book with the right paperwork, taxes and insurances they were desuaded. However this is one of my areas of expertise so I decided to create a platform to automate and digitalize the hiring, the taxes, the admin work, the payment etc. We have a beta site up and running in Sweden and we are running tests. It’s still very early days and small scale but it’s going very well. It’s creating jobs for people who have never been in the job market before, it’s making people from very different backgrounds meet and it helps busy families in everyday life. The immigrants who have not yet had jobs had no network amongst people who are well established in Sweden. They did not get jobs because they had no connections. Diretto helps them get started and to create a network. Some of the jobseekers say they want to stay in this type of job (for example women who were housewives in their home country) and for others it’s a way of starting out, getting some income, some references, getting contacts, practising the language and then move on to other more advanced jobs.

I'm engeged in promoting more women to become entrepreneurs. Together with a group of other female founders we have started a blog about what it's like to start and run a company. 

I've lived in various countries so I know it can be tricky in the beginning before you get to know people. I did one semester at Tilburg University as part of an Erasmus Exchange program. I studied social sciences as well as Dutch language and culture.