Please come home!

State employment agency Fás is trying to entice Irish émigrés back to the motherland.

Fás is focusing its efforts on Irish people who emigrated to the US in the 1980s, and is holding a job fair in New York's Manhattan later this month.

The Irish Times reported last week that the Irish Funds Industry Association will be among the many exhibitors at the New York jobs fair, hoping to draft in new recruits to work in Ireland's rapidly expanding funds industry.

David Hannon, divisional manager at recruitment agency PPG, says Fás' efforts may be useful when it comes to filling market risk analysis and equity derivative analysis roles, which Irish employers are finding particularly difficult to fill. These positions require individuals with a high aptitude for maths, and a finance degree, and possibly even a double degree or PhD in maths.

David explains that individuals working in the financial sector in the US, earning very large salaries, would have had to take huge pay cut to relocate to Ireland in the past, but this is not necessarily the case anymore. "There's a lot of people on €100,000 plus [in Ireland]," he tells us encouragingly.