Irish Job News - News on Jobs for Ireland

Good news today for people in the Mid-West with three companies announcing new jobs in this area. ON Semiconductors (www.onsemi.com) Mentor Graphics Ireland (www.mentor.com) and PAFS Ireland all announced plans to add extra positions in the companies yesterday.

On Semiconductors, formally a part of Motorola, is a semiconductor company specialising in energy efficient silicon. They will be establishing a new research and development centre in Raheen Business Park, Limerick. It is expected that they will have up to 49 new employees there.

Mentor Graphics Ireland, who provide software tools as well as consulting for electronic design, will be expanding their operations at the Shannon Free Zone. They will add another 35 employees to their existing operation where they currently employ 80 workers. Mentor Graphics in Shannon mainly provide logistic and distribution services from Shannon.

PAFS Ireland, will create 15 new jobs in the business service industry for aircraft leasing.

Well we are back blogging again, after a bit of a break. Here is an interesting experiment, where some lads in Dublin all get jobs, and see how long they can string the employers along, before they are fired. They give vary types of excuses, for the believable to the unbelievable. This was done by DogMedia Productions for the Darklight festival in 2007.

via Donncha

News has come today that the 47 employees at the design and innovation centre at Freescale (formally part of Motorola) are to loose their jobs. Freescale, who designs products for the mobile phone market, have offices located in the Cork Airport Business Park. The employees of Freescale were highly skilled, with over half of them having Master Degrees and 1/10th of them with PhD. So far no reason for the sites closing has been disclosed, but it is expected that the increased cost of operating in Ireland is one of the factors.

Today the 47 staff were informed by the management that they will be looking to close the plant by September this year, after a consulting period. This comes just over 14 months after Motorola decided to pull out of Cork. So after last week’s bad news about Hormann Electronics, electronic jobs in Cork just look like they are harder and harder to find. Freescale opened in Cork in 1998 with just 2 employees, and reached 40 employees in 2001 [source].

138 jobs are to be lost at the Cork Electronics company, Hörmann electronics. The company has gone into receivership just one week after the receivers David Gilbert from BDO Stoy Hayward in London and Liam Dowdall from BDO Simpson Xavier in Dublin were appointed. 117 staff have been been left go on Friday morning while the rest will remain until the end of the month.

The receivers said that there will be a redundancy package, but the details were not available at the time to be disclosed.

Origina, an IT services and and consulting firm have plans to add up to 60 new jobs in the next two years. This will bring the numbers who work for Origina to 120. The €3million investment is to help to bring the company to be a competitor to the traditional consulting firms. Origina, formally known as Unitech, will use €100,000 of the investment to rebrand the company and align the brand across Europe. Created in 1998 to meet the need of data storage management, Origina now offers project management, infrastructure and IT consolidation services. In the past they have also partnered with some of the bigger global brands like IBM , VMware, Orcale and Red Hat. The majority of these new jobs will be tech related positions and will at the headquarters in Dublin.

Medtronic (www.medtronic.com) have annoucned plans for wordwide cuts in their staffing. Up to 1,100 jobs worldwide are expected to go, which is almost 3% of it’s workforce. Thankfully this comes with a good note for Jobs in Galway , as Medtronic are moving their endovascular manufacturing operation from Santa Rosa, California, USA to Galway . The endovascular division makes stent grafts to treat aortic abdominal aneurysms. It is also moving some of it’s operations (diagnostic and cardiac rhythm disease management) to Holland.

Medtronic specialises in medial technology for chronic diseases. They manufacture products and therapies and services to alleviate pain and enhance peoples lives. Each year over 6 million people world wide use Medtronics services in the treatment of heart disease, diabetes and vascular illnesses.

The DETE (Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment , www.entemp.ie) has published some frightening figures on Irish redundancy rates. Year on year the number of reported redundancies in April rose by 47% between 2007 and 2008. The majority of these job losses were in the construction and manufacturing sectors, making up almost half of the reported redundancies. Up to April this year, there was more than 11,000 redundancies reported to the DETE. This figure is 27% larger than the same 4 months (January to April) in 2007. Standardised unemployment rate remains unchanged at 5.5% in April, according to the CSO (Central Statistics Office) and there is now 158,600 people on the live register (seasonally adjusted) , of these 58% were male. These news statistics come also with bad news from the Exchequer . As of the end of April, the tax take figures are around €736 million off their targets. Areas that had lower than expected revenues include the Capital Gains Tax and stamp duty receipts. These make up about €400 million of the loss. Micheál Martin, the minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment was quoted as saying that there currently is a “rebalancing” taking place in the economy.

So with all the doom and gloom in Ireland, and the apparent stagnant housing market in Ireland, it seems like the economy is starting to slow down. Now that unemployment is up, more redundancies are happening than previously and less people are selling their houses, the Celtic tiger is truly asleep.

A crazy news story from Italy today, apparently yesterday there was an official website publishing all the salary declarations and tax contributions for everyone in Italy. The tax authority’s website was overload by zealous Italians wondering how much their neighbours to big soccer stars earn.

The website was suspended within 24 hours of going live after an official complaint from the Italian’s privacy watchdog. The reason for publishing the details according to the Italian Finance department, well it was supposed to increase the country’s transparency. This has come just days before the administrational change in the government to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Some say the website was a way of getting back at the incoming government. More from the BBC.

Yesterday DELL (www.dell.com) announced that they will be cutting 250 Irish jobs from the plants in Dublin and Limerick. Overall the company employs 4,500 people in Ireland and this figure reflects just over 5% of their Irish staff numbers. Areas of DELL effected include sales/marketing/finance/tech support as well as other admin roles. Most of the job losses are expected to be in Dublin. Dell refused to confirm or deny further job cuts, but they did say that the other European operations will experience similar losses.

These redundancies have been announced in a period where DELL have experience double digit growth world wide, but they still need to cut costs. It is not yet clear whether DELL will reduce numbers further in Ireland, but with the current economic climate we can only speculate that it will more than likely happen. Dell has said that they will reduce their numbers by more than what the announced in May 2007. Last year we heard that the figures for losses of DELL in Ireland were to be around the 450 mark.

Here are some of the top news stories hitting the papers over the last few days:

Good news comes for Xilinx (www.xilinx.com) who say that they are increasing their customer support division in Dublin. It should result in about 20 new jobs for the site. Their Dublin site is their European headquarters and is host to 400 employees.

An estimate from the Galway City Tribune [1] says that there has been almost 500 redundancies in Galway since the start of the year. It cites that the hardest hit is the construction industry. The SFA (Small Firms Association) is quoted as saying that on average there has been 613 jobs lots per week in Ireland. This pattern of increasing unemployment is starting to look worrisome for the economy.

Last week DELL announced that they were cutting jobs in the US. In fact almost 1000 jobs were lost with the closure of a desktop PC factory in Texas. So far DELL has already cut 100 Irish jobs from their staff of 4,500. Last year DELL looked for voluntary redundancies at their plant in Limerick.

And another multinational Google, announced job cuts. This time it’s in their recently aquired advertising company DoubleClick. Again it is not likely that any Irish Jobs will be lost, in fact Google are looking to hire up to 150 staff at it’s European headquarters in Dublin right now.

Last year we mentioned that Genzyme in Waterford had plans on expansion. Genzyme (www.genzyme.com) employs around 10,000 people in the United States alone. They are a Massachusetts based company, based out of Cambridge near Boston. Producing drugs since 1981 to fight rare genetic disorders, kidney disease and cancer.

It now seems that the initial 52 jobs increase, will look more like 170 jobs (over 300% more than we reported). The plant will then employ around 600 people, who are responsible for manufacturing various pharmaceutical drugs like Renagel used in chronic kidney diseases.

Pharmaceutical Jobs

So if you are looking for a pharmaceutical job in Waterford, it’s time to dust off your CV.

Ryanair has announced that they will be cutting up to 40 jobs in their Dublin offices next month. These jobs are in the Telesales area. The Low Cost Airline reported that only 1% of their bookings were now done online and it no longer made sense to keep their most expensive call centre in Dublin open. Calls will now be redirected to their German and Romanian call centres.

Dell Job Cuts

In other job worries, DELL are planning on closing their Austin, Texas plant, with almost 1,000 job losses. This is part of the plan by DELL to reduce global numbers by up to 10%. To date there has not being a menion about about DELLs Irish operations in Limerick & Dublin, where they employ roughly about 4,000 staff.

Today has been a great day for Galway, today there has been two separate announcements about new jobs in Galway. Green Isle Foogs Ltd. are going to invest over €5 million in Portumna, Co. Galway. They will create up to 70 new jobs with the help of Enterprise Ireland. It is planned to expand their frozen pastry factory, and this will be done over the next 3 years. The jobs will be in production management, and direct production, as well as various support roles. And Thermo King (www.thermoking.com), a refrigerated transport company are to expand their operations at their Galway site. Up to 20 new jobs will be created, many of these will be in the research and design of the next generation of ‘environmentally friendly’ transport products. So if you are looking for a job in galway, things are looking good !

Last week there was a security at Ireland’s Largest online recruiter. Jobs.ie reported that last Thursday, March 27th, there was a security breech of their website and a number of CVs were stolen. Obviously these CVs contained a number of personal details and in the wrong hands these details could be used for illegal activities. One report mentions that up to 60,000 Irish CVs were stolen in this breech, which it is said were mostly archived CVs as opposed to current ones.

These CVS would be of great interest to criminals who steal identities, as there are plenty of personal details on a CV. This is not the first such attack, recruitment websites have been targets of previous hacking attempts, last year Monster.com was hacked. There is an announcement on Jobs.ie website which states:

Dear Jobs.ie Customers,

This notice is to bring to your attention a security breach that took place on the Jobs.ie website on Thursday evening.

If you have not received an email from Jobs.ie then your details have not been affected but we urge all our Users to follow the following safety tips:

1. Do not disclose personal banking information
2. Don’t share your passwords with anyone.
3. Don’t open suspicious email attachments.

I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to all our Customers who have been affected by this and assure you that we are taking every measure to insure that this won’t happen again.

A dedicated 24 hour customer helpline has been set up to deal with any further questions or concerns you may have. Please call +353 (0)1 680 8699 or email info@jobs.ie

Yours sincerely,

Huw Taylor
Jobs.ie - Recruitment Made Simple

Jobs.ie has also offered a helpline support for the people effected by this. Brian Honan from BH Consulting (www.bhconsulting.ie) commends Jobs.ie for being so upfront and honest about the whole situation. It is good to see that they had a quick turn around from detecting it, and letting their customers know. Don’t worry about our sister site JobsInIreland.ORG, doesn’t store the CVs, rather it sends the CVs directly to the employers, and none of your personal details are stored on our server.

For more, read the Jobs News report from Silicon Republic.

More good news for Ireland and the digital media industry, the American company EyeWonder (www.eyewonder.com) is to relocate it’s European offices to Dublin. EyeWonder said that the availability of highly skilled graduates and workforce was the main factor for moving to Ireland. Other similar companies like Blizzard have chosen to move to Cork last year, citing the same reasons. Barry Bedford, the Managing Director for the UK and Ireland said,

“We have established this sales and customer support operation to provide a better service to our international customers, and Dublin offers an ideal location due to its excellent infrastructure, multi-lingual capability, highly-skilled workforce and ease of doing business.”

EyeWonder produce online rich media and video advertising  since 1999. They already have some open positions on their careers section for  jobs, like a Rich Media Coordinator.  And there are plans to have up to 30 people working in their Dublin offices, mostly in sales and customer care positions.