Kevin Norlin, general manager for Quest Software in EMEA, who is responsible for the company’s new shared services centre in Cork, says it is half-way through its recruitment drive of 150 jobs, ahead of schedule.
Headquartered in California, and with sites around the world, Quest is involved in cloud computing, identity management and database technologies. It announced on 20 January that it was creating the jobs in Cork.
“We’re focused on three primary areas: sales reps to sell our software, support renewals reps and back office functions such as order processing and accounting. There are also other roles in HD, admin, IT and tech support,” said Norlin.
“I had been engaging with candidates since last October before we went public. For the sales rep positions we were looking for people with several years of experience preferably in selling software or hardware, but we’ve moved beyond that to sales professionals – people with a proven sales capacity who we can teach the product stuff to.
“We have found the recruitment process great and are pleased with our success. We have taken on people faster than I expected while meeting the requirements of the skill sets. There are a few languages such as Dutch and the Nordic languages that are tougher to find at times, but otherwise we are pleased.”
Plans to recruit engineers in the future
Quest has plans to introduce an element of research and development (R&D) in Cork over time and will recruit some engineers.
“Until we build a pipeline with universities and research centres, these positions will be harder to fill which is why we don’t have R&D as a huge focus of our initial plans for Cork,” Norlin said.
“Since arriving last October I have spent time with leaders at universities as well as with other companies and we plan to do our part to make sure the skillsets we need will be there for us when we want them – for instance if we want specialist virtualisation or security programming, we plan to help foster that by getting involved in university curricula and introducing training and internship programmes.”
