The Irish capital’s cosmopolitan edge is helping it grow into an international digital hub, says Personio’s Geraldine MacCarthy

Like many of her contemporaries in Ireland’s digital economy, Geraldine MacCarthy’s career has taken her to many places — including France, Germany, Poland and San Francisco — before returning home. But the Ireland of today is a very different country to the one in which she was raised — and her hometown of Dublin especially so.

It’s been a busy year for the mother of two, who in April last year left Dropbox, where she was Head of Business for EMEA, to join the rising European HR tech company Personio as Chief Revenue Officer.

Unlike a great many multinationals in Ireland, Personio is headquartered not in the US, but in Germany. Founded in Munich in 2015, it provides an HR platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and achieved unicorn status in January with a valuation of $1.7bn. Dublin is its fourth office.

“We’re seeing a lot more European businesses coming into Dublin,” says MacCarthy. “There’s a great ecosystem here, there’s a talent hub and a sense of interconnectivity that businesses can plug into and get a lot of advantages from straightaway. It’s easy to network.”

That the technology sector in Ireland is collaborative and supportive is widely acknowledged, but opening an office is never easy, and MacCarthy credits IDA Ireland, the government agency that attracts multinational investment, for helping make connections and guiding Personio through the necessary procedures.

“The IDA will pick out businesses that are similar in size or kind, so that you can get to meet those companies and immediately understand how things are done,” she says.

This is characteristic of the business culture, MacCarthy says. “We had a lot of other peer companies in Dublin, so we were able to not just make decisions in a silo. People are very willing to help — there's a strong desire to support each other as we grow out in Dublin.”

In the year since setting up in the Irish capital, Personio’s business has grown exponentially; it now has more than 4,000 customers across Europe, adding 1,000 in six months. Part of that is down to workplace changes brought on by the pandemic as businesses have dealt with managing remote and hybrid workforces. “It has changed the way everybody works,” she says. “It has highlighted the need for businesses, particularly SMEs, to have an HR solution in place.”

From digital onboarding to employee burnout, HR has faced plenty of Covid-related challenges that technology sometimes compounds. “You see this challenge of technology overload that’s been taking over in some people’s lives… It's become very intense,” she says. Technology in businesses needs to be “thoughtful” and help workers be more productive by “taking away tasks from them, rather than adding more tasks.”

Turning to her own workforce, MacCarthy sees diversity and inclusion as crucial to delivering Personio’s solutions. Although many companies pay lip service to these concepts, she observes that diversity delivers value in bringing differing viewpoints and experiences to problem-solving. “We serve what is a very diverse European market, but you can only do that if you have diversity within the team that you're building,” she says.

She feels that Dublin’s ever-growing diversity “has made it more attractive for even more people to come in, because they don’t feel like they are different.” But if the city has become much more international, some things haven’t changed — not least the people themselves, with their knack for getting along with whoever they meet. “I think Irish people in general are humble and down to earth,” she reflects. “That connection to others, and not getting too far ahead of yourself, is kind of what keeps people together.”