LinkedIn is to create 200 jobs at its Irish office, taking the number of people it employs here to 1,200.
The company is already actively recruiting for the first 100 roles, with LinkedIn’s senior director of international operations and Irish head Sharon McCooey expecting the remaining 100 jobs to be filled in the early months of 2017.
“We’re openly hiring. We started in 2010 and I was the third employee through the door,” Ms McCooey said. “It’s been great growth every year since.”
Dublin is the home for LinkedIn’s international headquarters, with sales and marketing operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa located here and more than 50 markets supported from the office. The new roles will reflect that, and will also include posts for customer support and engineering.
Among the engineering skills supported in Dublin are natural language processing. “It’s very specialist skills that are in demand. Dublin is becoming one of the centres of excellence and a number of the universities are working on this particular skill set,” Ms McCooey said.
Graduate recruitment
The roles are aimed at above graduate level, with Ms McCooey describing them as “first/second level roles”. LinkedIn has a graduate recruitment programme that takes in about 10 people each year.
“We have a good brand name as a company,” she said. “We are able to attract people to Ireland and we’re able to attract people to LinkedIn.”
LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner was in Dublin to make the official announcement.
“At LinkedIn, we’re continuing to invest in the people and infrastructure required to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” he said in a statement. “Ireland has proven to be a very strategic location for us to headquarter our EMEA operations, and we look forward to growing our footprint in Ireland by expanding our already 1,000-person team with another 200 employees.”
Skilled workforce
Taoiseach Enda Kenny welcomed the new jobs, saying it was a further demonstration that the State’s skilled workforce was highly attractive to technology firms. LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year in a $26.2 billion deal, is currently putting the finishing touches to its new headquarters, expanding its current offices at Wilton Place. Construction is set to finish early next year.
“LinkedIn’s ability to scale its EMEA headquarters in Ireland at such an impressive rate in recent years is a great endorsement of the talented workforce available to innovative global companies,” said IDA Ireland chief executive Martin Shanahan. “Dublin’s reputation internationally as a technology and internet hub is greatly strengthened by LinkedIn’s presence here.”
