Recruiting and retaining top talent is 'difficult business'

Attracting top talent is becoming a difficult business for companies across the Province, according to Ciaran Sheehan, Director of MERC Partners Northern Ireland.

Mr Sheehan referred a survey carried out by a leading US management consultancy firm which claimed that 89% of clients canvassed thought it was more difficult now to attract top people than five years ago and 90% thought it was more difficult to retain them.

This increased competition for talent is also evident in Northern Ireland, and Richard Maybin, Managing Director of Maybin Support Services (a client with MERC Partners), said: "We sought to recruit senior executives, however didn't know how best to go about it. In the past, we managed our own senior recruitment and relied heavily on the more traditional method of placing advertisements in the press.

"Given the pressures in the marketplace, we soon came to realise that we required help from specialists to help us attract the calibre we need to keep moving forward."

Ciaran Sheehan added that local business leader's could also become frustrated by the perceived levels of bureaucracy involved in the executive recruitment process.

"Although Northern Ireland is the most heavily regulated region in Europe in terms of employment legislation, executive search or 'headhunting' is not illegal and is in fact one of the most effective means of recruiting top people in this increasingly challenging time," he said.

MERC Partners, based at Clarendon Dock in Belfast, was named by the Economist Intelligence Unit as Ireland's leading executive search firm in its 2002 report on 'Executive Search in Europe'.

(MB)