Push and pull factors when choosing new places for work: How companies and professionals decide
#Talent Intelligence Management #Talent Attraction #Retention #Business Attraction
Deciding between multiple locations as a place to grow — and stay — is a high-stakes choice for both individuals weighing job offers across cities and companies expanding into new markets. Regional, national, and local factors must be considered alongside the needs and input of diverse internal and external stakeholders. Whether family members, employees, or leaders of corporate functions such as finance, talent acquisition, R&D, sales, or real estate, each brings its own priorities and criteria.
Location and talent intelligence can be used to identify push and pull elements that make talent and competitor ecosystems relatively more or less attractive. This helps companies decide whether to invest in outreach to attract talent from other cities or to expand into new cities to access professionals with critical skills who are unlikely to relocate.
This session offers a corporate lens on how these trade-offs are navigated in practice and what makes cities sustainable for attraction, development, and retention of talent and business over time, and introduces a “place as a product” concept, with “features” important to two important customers: talents considering relocation and companies considering new offices. How to weigh development of such features depends on what the long-term critical gaps might be.
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More About Megan Reif
Megan Reif brings more than two decades of international experience in research, spatial analytics, and strategic labor-market intelligence. Today she is part of the People & Organizational Analytics team at Volvo Cars, where she equips leaders with deep insights on talent supply, competitor ecosystems, and location strategy—work that earned the company the 2024 Tiara Talent Intelligence Award for Europe.
Her expertise lies in helping organisations understand where critical talent pools exist, why people choose certain places over others, and how companies can make smarter decisions about site selection, talent attraction, and long-term competitiveness. Her analyses range from neighbourhood-level comparisons to global location optimisation across Europe, APAC, and the United States.
Megan’s background spans political data science, survey methodology, and multi-method research. She has worked across the US, Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America, produced insights for senior leaders including former US President Jimmy Carter, and held academic positions in both Sweden and the US.
Before joining Volvo Cars, Megan spent five years in hands-on talent attraction, recruiting for some of Sweden’s largest employers across sectors such as automotive, life science, engineering, design, medtech, telecom, and FMCG.
Having spoken with hundreds of individuals navigating relocation decisions, she brings a uniquely human and data-driven lens to what motivates people to stay, move, and thrive in new places.
At PLACExNordic, Megan Reif offers a rare combination of research depth, practical corporate insight, and global perspective—highly relevant for anyone shaping attractive, competitive, and resilient places.
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