With the received wisdom saying that Ireland is currently in the grip of an ICT skills crisis and IT companies are having significant problems filling vacancies, it might come as a surprise to find out that this is not actually the case for everyone.
In fact for many companies, the opposite is true. Skilled candidates are relatively plentiful on the ground and companies can often pick and choose to find the best person.
Contrary experience
“For engineering talent, it’s very easy. We’re finding really, really great talent and that was our biggest risk coming into Dublin — the potential that we might not find good engineering talent. Luckily that hasn’t been the case,” said Kevin Olsen, director at Pivotal Labs in Dublin.
“Interestingly, the people we’re hiring are generally not local to Ireland; they come from all across Europe and our most recent hires here have been Italian and Spanish and we’ve a new guy from Russia, as well as a few people from Brazil. They’ve come to Ireland and have usually been here a year or two before they come to us. We’re finding that they’re really, really, highly skilled and pretty easy to hire.”
Non-engineering
Olsen said that while there are plenty of candidates out there, finding the right staff still isn’t always straight forward. Finding non-engineering staff can be difficult, in particular in the areas of product management and user experience.
“That skillset is a little bit harder to source. It’s different in the US, where these skills are more plentiful. Here senior UX designers are a little harder to find and they tend to be pretty happy with their packages in their existing jobs,” he said.
“I also think lean start-up methodologies around product management are pretty new here and it’s not that mature a community. But we are finding when we do engage the community and we have lean product management meet-ups, we’re getting really good interest and a lot of turnout. So I think it’s just a few cycles before Dublin has that kind of maturity in the community.”
In the case of user experience designers, Olsen thinks that the field just is not mature enough yet to have produced enough qualified people to make hiring candidates plentiful.
“It’s just not there yet. A lot of companies were hiring visual designers for this and basically not approaching the problem with a unified skill set but then, that kind of skill set is only really four or five years old even in the US so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it’s rare here.”
According to Olsen, Pivotal has not been hit by the housing shortage in Dublin as a factor in dealing with new hires, but does concede it could be an issue down the road.
Housing and schools
“We hear a lot in the media at the moment in Ireland about the difficulties people have in finding rented accommodation that isn’t stratospherically expensive but when you come from San Francisco it doesn’t seem so bad to us,” he said.
“But what people are finding is that it’s a tight market and it’s very competitive. When people are relocating to Dublin it can be very challenging. Trying to find somewhere before you physically get here is hard, and a few people who have moved here for us have found that very difficult.”
A further difficulty for staff coming into Ireland to work with companies like Pivotal is the challenge of having families slot into Irish life.
“We’ve also had a problem with people moving here with kids who find out there are long waiting lists for schools. That’s something that could use some serious attention. Dublin only has one international school and it’s only for primary school aged kids so there’s no secondary school group,” said Olsen.
“Anyone relocating with junior high or high school kids is going to face a challenge. They’re going to have to go into a regular private school system.”
Positive experiences
Data analytics specialist Tableau set up shop in Dublin nearly three years ago and reports that so far, its experience with sourcing staff has been positive.
“One of the main reasons why we set up in Dublin was because of the great pool of talent that’s here and we haven’t had much difficulty hiring the people that we need. We’ve recruited loads of very skilled and knowledgeable people and from a standing start three years ago there’re now 60 of us,” said Eugene Hillery, director for international operations at Tableau
“And we’re growing. We moved into new offices at the end of May and we’ve taken on some additional space as well so we’ll continue to expand and increase our headcount number.”
The skills sets that Tableau has hired include sales staff, customer technical support, product trouble shooting staff, finance and recruitment. According to Hillery, the criteria it looks for when hiring is that potential staff are tech savvy but interestingly, aptitude and interest are as important as qualifications.
“A lot of the people we hire will have a tech background or they might have studied management science or whatever in university but not necessarily always. Just having a keen interest in technology and data can be enough. We’re all about helping people see and understand their data and our data analytics software is different to most out there in the sense that it’s self-service orientated.”
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