Phoenix is Ireland’s fastest growing international recruitment brand and we partner with high growth Tech, FinTech, financial services, and professional services firms to find the best talent. I first founded Phoenix in 2018 after many years of experience in the recruitment field, and was then joined by our Director David Harrington and my co-CEO Ruth Lyndon.
Since then we have grown from just myself to over forty people. Currently we have offices in Dublin, Limerick and London, and we are launching our first US office at the end of the year.
What do you think makes this company unique?
Phoenix was created to address the weaknesses in traditional executive search and contingent recruitment which is often a transaction-focused, non-consultative, inconsistent experience. Therefore, a large percentage of our senior management are professionally qualified in their spaces in their verticals, Ruth being a great example as she is a qualified Solicitor having spent over 8 years training and practising in Ireland’s top corporate law firms. This industry experience means we are a recruitment agency with an elevated level of service that isn’t often seen in this sector, thanks to the deeper understanding these qualifications provide.
From our inception, we have consistently invested in the latest technology that allows us to deliver key hiring projects for our clients across the globe. Phoenix offers a fully digital recruitment service to many of our clients that are looking to hire professionals in locations where we do not have a physical office. Our tech stack is fully cloud-based, fully mobile and can be accessed by our consultants anywhere in the world.
We use a specialist data analytics platform to provide real-time insights to all our staff to ensure they are using their time in the most efficient and effective way which results in more time spent building relationships with our clients and candidates. Our phone systems are also fully digital, linked back through our CRM to track consultants’ performance when speaking to potential clients or candidates and we also use localised phone numbers dependent on the region where the project is situated. All the above differentiates us from many of our competitors and allows us to scale quickly as a business whilst providing our leadership team with advanced analytics to track performance and highlight potential opportunities for our business and clients.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Since founding Phoenix in 2018, the company’s ambitions have matched those of its clients. We have scaled continuously through the pandemic, and are looking forward to carrying on with this growth, both nationally and internationally. Currently, we have our Dublin office, which we set up in 2018 at the time of our company’s inception, and since then we have opened up spaces in Limerick and London. We have grown from a team of two to 40 people over the course of the last 3 years and that has been due to the strength of our professional backgrounds, client relationships and vision to create a major global recruitment brand headquartered from Ireland.
We are Ireland’s fastest growing recruitment brand and have a strong reputation, with clients such as four of our Irish Unicorns, which are growing internationally across both the US and Europe.
We just announced our most recent fundraising round. We were lucky enough when initially establishing Phoenix to have an investor that allowed us to grow and this same investor is now backing us again having seen our growth and we raised one million euros to support further growth in the future.
What can we hope to see from Phoenix in the future?
Ultimately, we want to build a new global recruitment brand, headquartered from Ireland, that rivals the very best in our sector globally. We are ambitious and will continue to scale rapidly, aiming to be a team of 250 people by 2025. In the short term, Phoenix will be expanding into the US by the end of the year. Most importantly, we want to maintain and further develop our amazing company culture which is central to all our growth plans – without a positive, collaborative and inclusive culture, none of our growth plans will be possible.
On top of our recent raise, in order to further strengthen expansion plans, Phoenix has recently put together a board of advisors. Members of this board include Philip Gardiner, Director at Foresight, and Giles Daubeney, the ex-global Deputy CEO of Robert Walters, one of the world’s leading recruitment brands. Both bring a wealth of knowledge and experience that will help bring Phoenix to new heights as it expands across the UK and the US, a phase I am very much looking forward to.
