Picking Poland's brains

"We are increasingly recruiting Poles for work abroad," the president of Impel HR Service, Grzegorz Tyszka, said. He claims Polish specialists are highly regarded in the countries that opened up their borders to the Polish labor force. "They are simply much cheaper," Tyszka adds. He says that most Poles that his company sends abroad are from the healthcare industry. "We mainly recruit doctors and nurses, i.e. highly qualified personnel, the lack of which is noticeable in Western countries," he says.

Sigmar Recruitment, the largest Irish recruiting company, which opened its Polish branch in January, came to Poland with the aim to provide services for the domestic market. While recruiting workers for work in Ireland is not the main focus of the firm, it still makes up around 25 percent of its activities. "We usually send technical people - engineers, software experts, as well as doctors and nurses," the company's general manager Mark Twomey said.

But while Impel HR Service concentrates on sending educated, highly-skilled specialists to Britain and Ireland, Prostream mainly sends blue-collar workers abroad. According to its managing director Conall McGuire, 95 percent of the people recruited by the company work in the services and construction industries. The company has also been involved in several contracts looking for drivers.
"Polish employees are keen, well skilled and good workers," McGuire says. What's more, their skills often exceed what is required by their job. According to the Prostream director, Polish drivers often stun their bosses by being able to "strip down the engine and fix it." He underlines that many of them are already familiar with working abroad and therefore have some knowledge of foreign languages. 

But McGuire notices a changing trend: "We can see that more and more companies in Ireland are becoming comfortable offering higher white-collar positions to Polish workers, for example site engineers, project managers and Autocad designers." McGuire added that Irish employers are accepting a lower level of English than they did previously. "They now realize that anyone arriving in Ireland at a white-collar level is highly educated and are able to improve
their English very quickly," McGuire says.