We headed to down to one of the largest careers fairs in Ireland to find out what some of the top companies were looking for.
For graduates, careers fairs are one of the best places to find out what certain employers really want out from their dream candidates.
When you’re looking to work at some of the biggest multinationals in the world, such as Apple, you’ll want to know what exactly they’re looking for.
Any insight into what a recruiter might be looking for in its employees gets potential candidates one step closer to getting their foot in the door.
University of Limerick (UL) hosts one of the largest careers fairs in the country, and Siliconrepublic.com headed down this year to find out what some of the biggest companies were looking for when recruiting.
Rob Buckley, operations manager at Apple in Cork, said they were there to recruit dynamic and energetic graduates for its Cork campus.
“We’re looking for candidates with a commerce or information systems background, but any candidate can apply as long as they’re somewhat energetic and dynamic.”
Graduates flocked to the fair to find out about the variety of graduate programmes on offer from the various sci-tech companies, to help decide which one would be right for them.
Cathal Heaslip is the training specialist at Fexco and he spoke about the five graduate programmes currently available.
“They range from our business graduate programme to our business intelligence, so a lot of daa analytics, working with databases, etc.”
Heaslip said Fexco is also looking for QA engineers and software engineers as well as graduates in security.
Computer giant Dell was also in attendance, looking to recruit graduates. “We’re looking for candidates that are really into innovation and into change,” said Karen Gillan, a senior analyst at Dell.
IT security engineer John O’Riordan was representing Qualcomm at the UL careers fair in search of graduates from engineering and computing disciplines.
EY was also looking to hire graduates from all areas. Maria Nyhan is EY’s graduate recruiter and she told us what the company was looking for. “About 40pc of our graduates last year were from non-business backgrounds,” she said.
“We’re looking for people from all areas. Science, arts, business, accounting, you name it. We just want to see good people.”
