This summer, Lead Recruiter at WP Engine Roxanne Molina sought to fill eight positions for the company’s brand new Limerick, Ireland office — thereby creating eight chances to bring some Irish culture to WP Engine.
“There’s no one on the team that has the exact same background,” said Molina. “Consequently, we’re in a virtuous cycle of rethinking how to recruit,” Molina explained. She added that finding someone with a willingness to learn was something she looked for instead of an abundance of tech experience.
Molina considers recruiting the Limerick team the hardest recruiting job so far at WP Engine. She describes one of the biggest challenges in recruiting for a brand new international office was that nobody in Ireland even knew what WP Engine was.
Jessica Devine, one of the Level 1 Customer Support Specialists on the Limerick team said, “I didn’t know much about it, [the job posting] just said ‘IT Firm.’ I don’t even think they mentioned WordPress in the article. It was all kind of vague, I think intentionally because they technically hadn’t announced the company was opening.”
“Our names weren’t even out there. I couldn’t advertise anything at that time,” said Molina. “I had to be very confidential, even my name was confidential. The posting was very vague.” Molina had to use the words, “hyper-growth company coming to Limerick” as the headline on job postings before WP Engine did an official press launch.
Once she got past that challenge she had to pull from a large pool of unknown talent in Ireland without any referrals. Because of Ireland’s sluggish economy in the last decade, many professionals have found it difficult to obtain traditional work experience.
Devine explained, “The unemployment under 25 is kind of high at the moment, so about six or seven years ago we went into a recession. I was about 17 or 18 years old when there were few jobs. A lot of my friends and my peers got used to not working and are on social welfare. For people my age, it is harder to get work, because obviously, you need the experience to get a job — and if you don’t have the experience you can’t get a job and it turns into a vicious kind of cycle. I ensured myself I wouldn’t do that and did everything I could to get work when I could.”
With the inability to get a part time job, Devine explained she was unable to support herself through the four years of college and only able to complete two good years.
Even though Limerick is an up and coming tech-friendly city, many of the support specialists hired had professional experience in customer support roles or hospitality with a passion for tech, which they would practice in their spare time.
“There was this system in Ireland where if you were unemployed for two years, you can go back to college for free. They paid everything for you to go back. So I was like ‘I want to work, but this is an incentive for me not to work.” So I played a lot of games, I did tech work on the side,” said Level 1 Customer Support specialist, Barry O’Dea. O’Dea added that he would go out to local homes to fix people’s wifi to keep his mind active before going back to college.
Fellow Level 1 Customer Support specialist and O’Dea best mate, Jamie Ryan, were actually in the same room when O’Dea was interviewing for the position with Molina. When Molina asked if O’Dea knew anyone else he could recommend for the position, he tapped Ryan on the shoulder and said, “I got you an interview, come on.”
Ryan is not traditionally taught in tech, but worked in several bars and is self-taught in coding. This is a perfect combination for a Customer Support Specialist because of the social background and having tech as a passion before turning it into a career.
“I had a great chance to turn essentially a hobby into a full-time career. It’s amazing,” said Ryan.
Molina said while technical experience is important, she mainly looked for a culture fit. She also added that finding people with the right attitude wasn’t that hard to find considering how everyone in Limerick was so nice and welcoming.
“Someone who has the desire to know the technical aspect of it and just like learning…those are the techs that I love and I want to work with,” admitted Molina. “Culture fit is the most important thing. Also, the customer service, so the need to actually want to help customers. If you find the two that you need and they’re not a culture fit — they’re not going to be able to work here. Even if you find the talent that you need, if they don’t understand our culture and values, it’s just not going to work.”
As of now, Ops Center Engineer, Daragh, and the Support Specialists Barry, Jessica, Jamie, Denis, Fintan, Johnny, Kevin, and Matt are meshing well in their new roles and enjoying their new careers as a part of the Ireland team and looking to lay a foundation for employees in Limerick.
“I’m just waiting for the catch,” said Ryan.
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