The first Career Zoo of 2013 took place on Saturday in The Convention Centre Dublin, where 9,000 visitors came to find out more information about the current jobs market and to speak directly to recruiters and companies with open positions. We spoke to key figures from the tech industry at the event to see what skills they’re looking for and find out what advice they may have for both job seekers and employers.
More than 100 Irish and international organisations were exhibiting at Career Zoo, where 3,500 jobs were said to be on offer. A popular booth at the event was PayPal’s, as the company is seeking to fill a number of positions in its Dundalk Operations Centre.
PayPal’s EMEA vice-president Louise Phelan was at the event and made sure to let us know of the importance of having a foreign language when seeking a job from a major global company, while AOL’s senior director of HR in Europe Marie Goggins told us what skills they’re looking for from software engineers.
Ryan Shanks, managing director of Accenture Talent and Organisation, Ireland, elaborated on some of the points he made at Friday’s Future Jobs Forum regarding in-company training and the soft skills that are in demand right now, and Dara Mullen from the IT Alliance backed this up by putting a call out to those with these skills to get in touch.
We also spoke to Annrai O’Toole, CTO Europe for Workday, who was at Career Zoo to recruit for new positions in this growing cloud-based SaaS company. ESB International was also there trying to attract new talent in the form of experienced engineers, and international operations manager Vincent Flynn spoke to us about the benefits of working with his firm.
We also asked Safann MacCarthy, European marketing director of IrishJobs.ie, to give us an overview of the Irish jobs market at the moment, and Anne Lanigan from IT’s Happening Here gave us an update on how this campaign to recruit for the Irish software industry has been performing.
