2 Decades in Dublin

I was sat down relaxing with my wife over the Christmas break, when we realised that I moved to Ireland 20 years ago this week! Given the time of year I thought that I might share some reflections on those two decades from what was meant to be a 12-month secondment!

In January 2002, I arrived at the Hays office - a beautiful Georgian building on Dawson Street - to be greeted by new colleagues. At the time it was 15 women and me! Thankfully they took me under their wing and the business flourished and the gender balance diversified as the Celtic tiger began to roar.

Whilst those Dawson Street offices where beautiful, they were also very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, a bit like my home office today!

I made lots of friends during those first few years, joining a local football team in Smithfield and socialising with my work colleagues that created friendships that endure to this day.

I really enjoyed work, getting the opportunity to open new offices, successfully helping lots of candidates and clients achieve their goals, with the most satisfying element seeing the progress of the people in my team.

In early 2008, I met my now wife and had bought an apartment. Things were going well professionally and personally, only for them to be disrupted by the banking crisis - which was particularly acute in Ireland with the collapse of Anglo-Irish Bank. Suddenly everything that seemed so secure, felt vulnerable. Like with any economic crisis, people lost jobs and the business environment became incredibly challenging.

It was about this time that my manager at work changed, and I was asked by my new boss, Ireland MD Richard Eardley, to focus on developing Enterprise relationships with some of our Technology customers. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this economic adversity combined with this new role set me on the trajectory for the job I have today.

In time the business started to rebound. We were committed to building it back, different… better than it was it was before. The old days of transactional relationships needed to change to provide more value and better experiences. I immersed myself in the tech world and built our values around providing insight and expertise to candidates, clients and our own employees alike.

The business grew consistently, and it meant that when the UKI Technology Director moved on in 2015 I was well positioned to get that role. Fortunately, the UKI MD had the foresight to be location agnostic on where I was based and, if I was prepared to spend time with the business, it meant that I could do this being based out of Ireland.

The role expanded in 2018 to include EMEA and our professional services business James Harvard, still based in Dublin and the business continued to grow. Then once again in early 2020, as in 2008, a new crisis loomed, this time not an economic one, but a pandemic like nothing we had seen in our lifetimes.

However, like before ultimately this created opportunity. Very early on, it became very clear that Technology would be critical as we worked out way through this pandemic. Initially this was very reactive, getting everyone working from home, reliably and securely. As the summer of 2020 progressed and as I spoke to more C-level executives, it became clear that customer and employees’ ability to access products and services was the key priority and digital transformation was going to accelerate to a rate that we have never seen before, creating an even greater supply and demand mismatch.

Concurrently I was asked to take on an expanded role with Hays, still from Dublin, but this time from my home office to ensure that Hays Technology played a key role in delivering the talent required to address this opportunity.

On reflection (and I think in 2015 probably rather uniquely), I was lucky enough to have an employer who had the foresight to see that geography wasn’t necessarily a constraint on hiring. This means that my family is settled in a beautiful part of Dublin where we have great schools, parks, the beach and we have become part of the community with involvement in GAA and football clubs.

It has also meant that my career hasn’t been constrained by the fact that despite Ireland’s size in the global context and especially as hybrid working as become the new norm, I haven’t had to curtail my ambitions, whilst also being able to spend quality time with my wife and kids.

I am looking forward to the reopening up of the world for business travel at some point to spend time in various countries with my colleagues. However, I anticipate travel will be less frequent as everyone becomes increasingly cognisant of the impact of our actions on the environment and the undeniable fact that many of us can work as effectively from our homes as we can from the office. The pace of change has been relentless over the last 21 months and undeniably things will never be the same again. With the risk of sounding cliched on reflecting on my 20 years in Ireland, the only constant has been change and I’ve learned in every crisis there will be opportunity.

And as for me, well I might not have the accent and I might still support England in rugby and football, but I have a love for Ireland and in particular Dublin.

I have been made to feel welcome from the day I arrived, I’ve met my lifelong friends here (although like the Irish diaspora, many are now spread across the world!) I’ve met my wife here; I’ve had my children here.

I am proud to call Ireland home.