Search This Blog

January 04, 2011

Multinational companies are desperate for multi-lingual recruits:

So reports The Sunday Times. Fiona Donegan. UK and Ireland operations manager for Adecco, the world's biggest temporary recruitment agency, said she was doubling the number of of recruitment consultants with foreign languages to cope with a surge in demand for multi-lingual candidates. Adecco is working with IDA Ireland to hire people in Ireland with German, Dutch and Nordic languages for roles in IT, customer service, compliance and back-office administration.

Grafton Employment Group said a third of 334 permanent job vacancies on its books were multilingual roles. We are seeing an increase in job flows from multinationals over the past seven or eight months, and our clients are giving first priority to candidates with an additional language," said Cathy McCorry, managing director of Grafton in Ireland. "We would encourage job candidates to build on their language capabilities. For instance, if you were a student planning a gap year, instead of travelling in the States, you should go to Norway or Russia to develop your languages."

Careerwise, a recruitment company said it had seen a 24% rise in new positions from multinational clients in the past six months

Facebook, the social networking giant, said it planned to create 100 jobs at its Europe, Middle East and Africa headquarters in Dublin over the next year. The company is already advertising roles such as platform operations analysts with Hebrew, German, Italian or Arabic and fraud analysts with Cantonese, French and Indonesian. It also wants sales associates with Norwegian, Dutch and German.

When the Higher Education Authority (HEA) asked employers what they expected from Irish graduates in the fields of arts, humanities and social sciences, the resounding answer was the ability to speak foreign languages. According to the recent HEA report, students of foreign languages accounted for just 3% and 2% of undergraduates in Irish universities and institutes of technology, respectively.

The language shortfall in Ireland has not gone unnoticed . John Herlihy from Google has been vocal about the need for a recasting of the Leaving Cert to focus on more foreign languages. Just 30% of Google's workforce in Ireland is Irish because the company hired most of its employees from continental Europe.

Source: www.careersportal.ie

No comments:

Post a Comment