Facebook to hire about 100 new staff for European Headquarters this year

Facebook’s European, Middle East, and African (EMEA) office will hire about 100 extra employees by the end of the year, according to the company’s Head of Office, Gareth Lambe.

The announcement was made in a  recruitment video released by Facebook in the past week.

To help fill the gap, the EMEA office, which is based in Dublin, is working with Make IT in Ireland (@makeitinireland |Facebook | Google+), recruitment program designed to promote Ireland as a tech hub to engineering and sales people across Europe.

Ireland also hosts offices for Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, Twitter, PayPal, and Intel, all of which are involved in the program.

Lambe says that Facebook currently employs over 400 staff in its Dublin offices, but needs to increase this to 500 by 2014.  The company currently has open positions for data and database engineers, Oracle engineers, network engineers as well as positions for multilingual sales and marketing staff; and multilingual analysts.

Facebook’s recruitment drive is part of the larger efforts by Ireland’s technology sector to attract more top talent. We spoke to the man behind the Make IT in Ireland campaign, John Dennehy, the CEO of Zartis, last month and he said that the eight companies involved are looking for over 5,000 staff this year.

“The much quoted figure is 4,000 to 5,000 open positions in the tech sector in Ireland. This, however, is the wrong way to look at it. If 10,000 software developers arrived in Ireland next week they’d all have jobs in three months. Every major tech company in the world would grow their development teams here.

These 10,000 roles would create an additional 10,000 to 70,000 additional roles through the “multiplier effect.” It’s a strange concept but bringing in talent to fill jobs will actually reduce Irish unemployment rates.

There is no cap [in the potential number of positions]. Innovation and subsequent economic growth is dependent on human capital. If we have the best people in Ireland we will have the best tech sector. Everything will follow the people.”