Personio, a human resources technology company, is on the lookout for more office space in Dublin amid plans to increase its headcount here.

The firm’s CEO and co-founder Hanno Renner told the Irish Independent that the company expects to employ around 600 people in Ireland in the “medium-term”.

Personio offers small and medium-sized businesses recruiting, human resource management and payroll support through its HR software.

Currently 120 people work in Personio’s international sales and software engineering hub in Dublin. By the end of this year that number will have increased to over 200.

Its current office in Dublin has space for about 250 people.

“We are looking to get permanent spacing [where] several hundred people can go. Over the next couple of years, [there will] be several hundreds, probably 500-600 mark in the near-term,” Mr Renner said.

“Our head of workplace has a lot of experience…he is starting to look into spaces which could help us continue to grow and give us a permanent home in Dublin for many people to join,” he added.

The company, which was valued at $1.7bn (€1.4bn) in January, recently signed a lease on its current office space for 18 months. 

“We are taking the time to find a proper long-term home as well,” Mr Renner said.

Going forward, as people return to offices the company will offer staff a hybrid way of working.

“We also see a benefit of people coming together regularly and spending time in person. This will be in a very flexible and hybrid manner, but we do still believe we want to create offices and we will invest in offices to make it a great place for people to come together,” Mr Renner said.

Personio’s clients are small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) that employ between 10 and 2,000 people.

“We are making SMEs more effective by being able to find better talent, to onboard them more effectively, to manage them even in a remote setting, but also to free up some of the administrative work from the people team,” Mr Renner said.

Founded in Munich in 2015, the company now has five offices in Europe. Its Dublin office is headed up by Geraldine MacCarthy, the firm’s chief revenue officer.

“We felt Dublin has a great amount of talent to help us grow across the whole continent,” he said.

Mr Renner is also involved in lobbying to help European technology companies compete with US firms that currently dominate the sector. 

 

“There is no reason why there can’t be global technology companies evolving from Europe,” he said.

“There is proof to that with companies like Spotify… I do think there is not just great talent, but a huge local market for SMEs, the European market is larger than the US market so there is no reason why there can’t be global winners established from the European market,” Mr Renner said.

“I do think however, in order to do that and to achieve that… we also need to focus on some of the pieces that can help us… [for example] make it easier to employ people across the different locations.”