Roderick Smyth – Founder and CEO of Arithon
“I’m very excited to have an opportunity to participate in the direction of Irish Recruiters as I’ve been very impressed with Declan and the ethos on which he founded the group. It’s no surprise that membership has grown to over 1,000 members and I look forward to adding to the community to learning from the other members.”
Michael Wallace: - Commercial Director, Loadszajobs
Educated at WIT, Michael’s publishing career started in London where he worked for one of Europe’s most successful b2b and b2c publishers, EMAP. During his four years at EMAP he was part of the team that launched the UK’s first Internet Magazine appropriately named, Internet Magazine and the UK’s first Weekly computing title ‘Network Week’. Network week tapped into the growing community of Technical professionals in the UK and was an obvious vehicle for recruitment advertising, here began his interest in the recruitment market which led him to online recruitment soon afterwards. In 1997 he started and set up the first international office of the UK Recruitment Website TopJobs which he managed successfully until 2001 when the Irish Business was purchased by Denis O Brien. Ireland was an ideal test market for their expanding business and was quickly one of Europe’s most advanced internet recruitment markets with all the global recruitment websites competing in Europe’s fastest growing economy. As part of a management team that rolled out a business model across 14 countries Topjobs became the first internet recruitment site to float on Nasdaq. Michael has experiencing the Dotcom boom and bust era which was an invaluable learning experience and he witnessed the changing face of recruitment as it moved online at such lightning pace.
With over 15 years in publishing and more than 7 years in online recruitment he believes the best has yet to come in the online Recruitment Sector. "Innovation is being driven by the emerging challenge of social media and the increasing expectations of advertisers and job seekers. Online recruitment advertising is still evolving and most of the job boards are bracing themselves for huge change which is overdue and inevitable.The Irish Recruiters group is a perfect example of how users and industry innovators can drive change in a sector or marketplace and I look forward to being part of the Think Tank that will strive to improve the quality of services provided within the Irish recruitment Market in the coming years.”
Jonathan Campbell – Co- Founder and Director of Select People
A career recruiter, Jonathan holds a Bachelor of Commerce from UCD and remembers the days when CVs came in the post and you faxed them to your clients! In 2006, having spent 8 years recruiting accountants in Dublin, Jonathan relocated to the Cayman Islands with his wife and two dogs. There he managed the island’s largest Recruitment & Immigration Company, using his first hand experience of life off-shore to help hundreds of other like minded professionals to realise their career ambitions overseas. He returned to Ireland in early 2008 and established Select People, a specialist reinsurance and banking sourcing firm that finds talented people globally for international clients. Jonathan is passionate about technology, a gadget freak and a serial Facebooker and tweeter. His clients are primarily overseas and his company competes against recruiters in some of the most advanced markets in the world. Select People have positioned themselves as internet recruiters and Jonathan and his partner Vincent were quick to embrace the power of cloud computing, social networking and Boolean searching. He is a firm supporter of the Irish Recruiters Club and was honored to be invited to participate as a member of the Think Tank:
"The Irish recruitment industry is currently lagging behind our international peers and the only way that we are going to be able to compete in the next phase of global growth is by being ahead of our international competition. As a small island, we need to band together and share our collective ideas and experience to ensure that Ireland becomes a global leader and innovator in recruitment techniques. By participating as a member of the Think Tank I hope to be able to share the experience of Select People with my peers in Ireland and also to learn from the many talented individuals out there in the Irish market."
