...Andrew Murphy agrees. The chief executive of Sláinte Healthcare, Europe’s fastest growing technology company, is creating 80 jobs in software engineering, testing, business analysis, client administration, finance and marketing this year.
“The multinational firms have a recipe list of what skills they want and how many years of experience you should have,” he said. “Often we are more about bringing people in and developing them. It’s less about how you got pre-packaged skills then showing the capacity to code well and have a lot of initiative.”
“We are always interested in graduates and people who have just graduated. We’ve been reasonably successful to date in hiring people direct from college, because we run internships with DCU’s software engineering programmes.”

Sláinte Healthcare sells software designed to make hospitals more efficient by enabling them to migrate to paperless systems. It automates the health insurance process for 35 hospitals in Ireland, processing more than €1bn worth of claims a year, and its Vitro software allows hospitals, including those in Australia and the Middle East, to switch to electronic patient charts from paper charts.

The Sandyford-based company already has 90 employees across its office in Ireland, the Middle East, Australia and the UK, after hiring 40 more last year. It was ranked third in Deloitte’s 50 fastest growing companies for 2013, having expanded by more than 1,500% in the past five years. “If you go to a larger company, you’re often just a number,” Murphy said. “If you come to an indigenous company that is smaller but growing very strongly, you put yourself in a frame for riding on that growth.”

Gonda, meanwhile, is chasing more career growth of his own, by studying for Microsoft certification to become a systems administrator. He expects to sit three more exams this year.