Healthcare and hospitality are among the sectors you are expecting to be recruiting when you walk through the doors of the Laois jobs fair at the Midlands Hotel but face-painting and magic comes as more of a surprise. “I’m packed with work,” says Romina Roe of Brightness Entertainment through a beaming smile, though. “That’s why I’m here looking for help.”
She’s far from the only one. The local chamber of commerce, which organised the event in Portlaoise, bills it as having hundreds of jobs on offer and the range includes everything from roles in accounting to engineering, retail to recycling. The list goes on. There is, it seems, a shortage of almost everything just now.
For some of the 40-plus companies and organisations with stands, however, on-the-spot recruitment is not the sole priority.
Some have come to connect with young people or network with other exhibitors, they say, and while Garda sergeant Jason Hughes is here to talk about a career in the force, he has also been doubling up fielding queries on dog licences, among other things.
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“We’re happy to answer any questions at all but the level of interest in the job has been really good too,” he says. “It’s a changed world, it’s become very small and you meet a lot of people in their teenage years already thinking of leaving.
“So I think we need to be out there, at events like this, competing, getting our foot in the door.”
The event allows Midland Steel to “put your fingers on the pulse” of the local jobs market, as HR manager Sean O’Donoghue puts it.
“What are people looking for? What are their expectations around jobs? You know, people talk about expecting to see a lot of people moving to the midlands, wanting to leave the Dublin traffic, etcetera, and this is a chance for us to see if that’s real.
“Also, we get to talk to younger people about what their expectations are around careers, remuneration … Covid has had a massive impact on people’s expectations in terms of remote working, for instance.”
Accommodation is an issue, he acknowledges, but “as a business, we’ve got our own balance in terms of how we see that’s going to work. We’re a hands-on business. We produce hands-on material. A lot of our work isn’t suitable for remote or hybrid working, so it’s trying to see what are people’s expectations when it comes to that.”
The company is expanding substantially, with a new plant to open nearby next year, but even a repeat of the two staff they hired at this event last year would, he says, be “a great result,” especially if they were in the more niche engineering roles.
If every one of the 2,000-odd people who walked through the doors over the course of the day was a healthcare professional, Nuvo Healthcare Recruitment could probably place them but they would be happy, Amy Dormer suggests, with a repeat of last year’s haul, which unexpectedly included a couple of nurses.
A few feet away Jacinta Greene says Supermac’s hired an accountant and 10-12 people in the catering area here a year ago. She left with a pile of CVs, she says, and “started a number of conversations” that resulted in people taking up some senior roles in the company.
This year, an early plus is the number of Ukrainians and other migrants who have been living locally a while and feel their English is good enough to talk about taking on a job.
Enva, meanwhile, a major recycling firm with about 400 staff in Ireland, and a major employer in the area, has 16 roles to fill. A wide range of roles, many of them suitable for remote working, and the number of company locations helps the offering, according to HR manager Erin Hooban, who also expects to leave having hired people.
The attraction goes well beyond that, says chamber of commerce chief executive Caroline Hofman, who moved here herself a few years back and now sells the county with some zeal, pointing to more manageable house prices, good infrastructure and a strong jobs market.
“I was commuting myself up to 2020 but once you stop that you never want to back,” she says.
