‘Coming from a farming background you have an entrepreneurial spirit within you’

In 1995, Seamus Pentony made a big career change when he swapped life as a dairy farmer for the world of recruitment. He had no experience of recruitment at the time so it was a leap into the unknown. Almost 30 years later, he hasn’t regretted his decision to quit farming for a moment.

Pentony began life as a recruiter in the Dundalk offices of Grafton Recruitment and took to it like a duck to water. “I’ve always been interested in people and good at drawing them out and that has stood to me,” he says. “When I started the job, I had a mentor, Siobhán Corcoran, who was second to none. She was vastly experienced and knowledgeable and took me under her wing for which I am forever grateful. I started off as a technical recruiter and burnt the midnight oil getting my teeth into understanding engineering, production and manufacturing processes and what the roles within them entailed.”

Within a year the Dundalk office was turning in results that got Pentony noticed at senior level within the company and he was moved to Grafton’s Dublin office. Then an opportunity came up in central Europe and he was offered the job. He moved to Warsaw in 2001 and has been there ever since.

“When I moved to Poland it was pre-EU accession, so a very different landscape to today,” he says. “The collapse of the rouble and the Polish zloty, as well as other severe economic headwinds after the heady days of the post-Berlin wall collapse and its accompanying optimism, made it a challenging business environment. But with that come exciting opportunities if you’re willing to go after them.

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“Coming from a farming background you have an entrepreneurial spirit within you because you often have to take risks and try new things, and the same applied here. In 2004, 2005 and 2006 we were one of the leading recruitment companies across the whole CEE [central and eastern Europe] region and a big success story within the Grafton Recruitment group.”

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Perhaps in recognition of this success, Pentony was headhunted in 2006 to lead the push into central Europe by the then-young Irish engineering recruitment start-up Headcount Solutions. Today, he’s the company’s regional partner and his remit covers CEE as well as Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Ukraine and Russia before the war.

“Taking the job with Headcount was a big step out of the corporate world I knew but also a great opportunity to start a pan-European recruitment and search business from scratch. Today, hiring for senior manufacturing roles is a big part of our business across finance, engineering [ ...] and design. We’ve also become heavily involved with data centre-related recruitment over the last 36 months and business has really escalated in this time,” Pentony says.

“Everything here is contracts based. When contracts are agreed it’s pretty straightforward but getting the details right from the get-go is the challenge. Relationships are initially very formal and the same applies across the greater CEE/SEE [southeast Europe] regions but once the trust has been built it’s normally easy enough. Also, the support and camaraderie within the international expat community here is amazing and should never be undervalued or underestimated.”

Pentony likes to work from the company’s downtown offices as he found that working from home did not suit him. “I like the purpose and discipline of going to the office and found I couldn’t summon up the same energy WFH [working from home] during the lockdown,” he says. He also spends a lot of his time on the road meeting clients and candidates.

“Warsaw is fantastic in that you can be pretty much anywhere in Europe within three hours. I feel it’s very important to meet people to understand how they interact and communicate. Face to face you get a sense of the person and after 30 years I’ve learned to trust my instincts. New developments, such as recruitment technologies and remote hiring can be useful and improve efficiency but for C-suite and senior roles it’s all about the person and whether or not they are a good cultural fit for an organisation.

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“One of the dangers of automated tools is that they miss things,” Pentony adds. “For example, I’ve come across people who couldn’t write a decent CV to save their lives, but as you comb through what they’ve written, you spot something [which automation would not] that piques your interest and they’ve turned out to be really good hires.”

Pentony is a founding member of the Irish Polish Chamber of Commerce and one of his big commitments outside work is to the St Patrick’s Charity Foundation. He’s the foundation’s chairman and takes an active role in organising its annual charity ball.

“I’m not boasting here but the ball is the only Irish social event of note in Poland,” he says. “Pre-pandemic we were hosting 700 guests and have raised over €1.3 million for a multitude of causes across Poland. We were all set to go in 2022 for our first post-pandemic ball and then the war in Ukraine started and we cancelled the event. Five million refugees flooded into Poland and everyone got involved in helping them, and the Polish people dug deep. It was truly incredible to see that volume of people with their whole lives in a trolley bag. It was beyond words and honestly something I never ever want to witness again.”