​Recruiting from abroad

As many people know, Ireland’s unemployment rate declined to 5.9% in April 2018. This is the lowest the unemployment rate has been since the Celtic Tiger. Because of this, companies are trying even harder to retain their staff. By offering better perks and benefits, and often counter offers, companies are becoming more and more competitive in order to retain their staff. It’s an employee driven market – a switch from the past 5 years. Candidates have a lot more options when it comes to furthering their career.

In the time that I have been working in Mason Alexander, I have seen a massive skills shortage in a number of areas within our banks. Some of the reasons for this include; stricter regulations enforced by the Central Bank, post-Brexit banks who are now relocating to Ireland with the same demand for skill sets and more competition and opportunity for candidates with technical skillsets in particular. Because of this we have had to proactively look for people outside of the Irish market.

In February of this year, we completed another international talent conference for one of Ireland’s leading financial services providers. Due to the growing demand for technical skillsets and the particular demand within risk analytics, we identified a new opportunity to draw candidates to Ireland. This is the latest of many trips that Mason Alexander have made to tackle the candidate shortage problem, and to ensure our clients are getting the best people.

We travelled back to Warsaw, after the success of our trip in 2016. With the temperatures at a FREEZING minus 6 degrees, we gathered a full room of banking professionals with the quantitative skill set our client was after. We identified Warsaw as a city populated with Risk professionals and there is a prominent Polish community in Dublin (As of 2016, there are over 120,000 Polish people living in Ireland).

We enlisted senior people within our client’s business who were struggling to find talent in Dublin who spoke about what they were looking for and about how they were being progressive in terms of their business. After speaking with several Polish candidates who had already relocated to Ireland, we identified what would entice these potential candidates to Dublin. This included having a ‘real life’ candidate story. We enlisted the help of a native employee that had made the move to Dublin a few years ago. He spoke about “życie w Dublinie” (Life in Dublin), and what it was like for him when he moved over, and his experience working for our client.

After the presentation, we gave candidates the opportunity to network with the company employees that were in attendance, and to discuss opportunities in more detail and to show their interest in relocating.

The event was very successful. In recent years, we have seen the need to look outside of our talent pool in Ireland due to the competitiveness of the market. This is just one of the many ways we here at Mason Alexander are aligning ourselves with our clients and helping them to achieve success.

For more information on opportunities in Ireland or within the banking space, get in touch with me.

Contact me at hello@masonalexander.ie or on (01) 685 4414