Around 1,000 students and graduates attended GMIT’s fair, meeting with such companies as EY, Accenture and Genesys.
Many employers are still in the midst of their ‘graduate season’, looking to fill their pipeline with top talent.
To help you discover which companies are hiring and what they might be looking for in new hires, we visited the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) Careers Fair on 30 September.
To kick things off, head of GMIT’s School of Science and Computing, Des Foley, highlighted the primary reason for the fair, which was to give students and graduates of the college the chance to engage with potential employers.
“But more than that, it helps GMIT link in with both local and regional, and national and international employers, so they can meet our students and see what they’re capable of,” Foley added.
The companies exhibiting at the fair certainly had high expectations, with some having recruited new team members at the previous year’s event. Overall, 93pc of graduates from the institution are employed in a wide range of industries.
Some of the biggest names in business, tech and science were in attendance to speak to more than 1,000 curious students and graduates, with firms such as Accenture and EY, as well as indigenous companies such as LotusWorks.
Opportunities
Although they were presenting their opportunities at GMIT, many companies explained that they’re hiring for positions in offices all across the country.
Genesys, for example, is recruiting for 15 new positions in its Galway office, where candidates can expect to work on AI and machine learning technologies.
But for EY and Mazars, they’re casting hiring nets across the nation, with EY seeking to fill 270 positions on its graduate programme across offices in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Galway.
But who are they looking for?
In order to recruit the best people for the available positions, companies have some definite parameters around what they’re hoping to find.
Development director at Electronic Arts, Alex Mann, said: “We’re here to raise the profile of Electronic Arts here in Galway, to try and get some new talent on our team and keep the passion flowing within our industry.”
He went on to describe ideal the candidate for the company as “someone who’s passionate about games as a whole” and who has “a degree in any form of computer science or computer engineering”.
But softer skills are becoming more and more important in light of the future of work, and this is clearly reflected in the attributes being sought by companies now hiring.
Eoghan Corey, business and technology integration analyst at Accenture, said: “It’s not so much your technical skills, you just really need to have a good attitude for problem-solving. You need to be able to adapt to problems that are thrown at you.”
Meanwhile, Mazars is on the lookout for “different people with different ideas”. The company’s in-house recruiter, Katie Barrett, described the ideal candidate as: “People who can challenge the processes we have, bring new ideas and change the way we do things.”
Watch the video above now to find out more about what the hiring companies had to say.
