The publicly-quoted recruitment company CPL Resources has bought the Irish-owned Richmond Recruitment Group for an undisclosed sum.

Richmond's offices in Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Galway will remain under the Richmond name and continue to be managed by Graham Burns.

CPL chief executive Anne Heraty said the acquisition was one that CPL was keen to do because of Richmond's good regional presence and strength in the temporary recruitment sector.

"We believe that adding the Richmond business to the CPL network will have a strategic benefit for the group," Ms Heraty said in an announcement to the Irish Stock Exchange.

The Richmond Recruitment Group, which was founded in 1990, has around 300 people working on temporary placements with its employer clients and has around 25 internal staff. It operates in the sales, administration, finance, IT and pharma sectors.

The most recent accounts for Richmond filed at the Companies Office show that it turned a pre-tax profit of €3,403 in the year to the end of August 2005, a turnaround on the pre-tax loss of almost €344,500 it recorded the year before.

Its gross profit in 2005 was €2.95 million, with administrative expenses coming to €2.89 million, while the profit and loss account at the end of August 2005 was running a loss of €1.2 million. Its total assets less liabilities at that time came to €1.16 million.

Ms Heraty said that CPL, which places around 20,000 people in temporary and contract positions every year and finds permanent jobs for around 9,000 more, was not experiencing any slowdown in the Irish labour market.

"There are skills shortages in certain sectors, not across the board, but in areas such as the IT sector," she said.

CPL is not significantly exposed to a slowdown in the construction sector.