Tom Neville (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On recruitment, my opinion, which is partially based on sitting on the Committee on the Future of Mental Health Care, is that in respect of health in the public service in particular - social work is coming in under Tusla, which was under the HSE - the rigidity of the centralised recruitment system is hampering us in a market where we have a scarcity of supply.

My background is that I have spent eight years as a recruiter and a headhunter around the world. In a market where there is a lack of supply, high real-time flexibility is needed. That is what happens in the private sector and in the private sector headhunting is carried out. Companies do not even rely on reactive advertising or recruiting because it does not work and they are in such a tight market. That is something that the Government as a whole needs to look at and I have been calling for it for quite a while. The problem is that obviously we are dealing with big Departments that we are trying to move and I understand that because I have also recruited internally in the private sector for multinationals. As they are able to get it right to react to the markets, there is no reason why the public service should not be able to react to it. That will take some sort of forthright leadership and sitting down with unions to try to gain that flexibility because on the flip side, when the markets turn the other way, obviously there may be oversupply and then the criteria to recruit change. That is not taking away from the fact that the best qualified person is wanted for the job or the person best qualified to do the job is wanted, but flexibility is key to recruitment.

As the witnesses have said, it is a global market and Ireland needs to react to that. We are not acting enough on it. During the recession, I went to Australia as a recruiter and I hired people from Ireland. It was quite easy as there was a flow of graduates from Ireland because there was no work here. Ireland needs to look at trying to bring those people back. There is a need for a study, perhaps through the universities, on what point in time an emigrant looks at coming back or at making that critical decision. A lot of times people will go, not because of the job, but because of a desire to experience the world and that is fair enough. We live on a small island and it is a big world out there. There are points in time, maybe three and four years away when these people look at settling, they ask themselves if they will settle in this foreign country and they think about coming back. They will make that critical decision and once they settle in that country it is very difficult to bring them back if they get married or have kids or whatever. It is at that point where they make their decision and we need to do more, possibly through the universities, to ascertain where that point happens and to target that point to bring those people back.

On multiculturalism, because we are in a global market, Ireland needs to start grappling with this. The witnesses have welcomed the fact that there are people from different backgrounds applying for these positions. We need to do more on that and we need to start competing on that. The likes of Australia has more resources to pay people. That is a fact of life. It has more natural resources, it is a bigger country and its continent is the size of Europe. We have to deal with that. I know there are issues around remuneration and conditions. We can work on the conditions.

Have studies been done on my point about when people make those critical decisions? Have graduate surveys been done on what way people are thinking? If it is a case that we will start paying for experience through the graduate programme, what are the witnesses' thoughts on compelling graduates to work for perhaps two to three years or whatever after their graduation in order to facilitate that? Is it a runner or is it a non-runner? Will it turn people off? It would be interesting to get the witnesses' thoughts on that.