Potensis eyes Dublin and Berlin
POTENSIS Recruitment, the UK-based specialist recruiter recently acquired by funds managed by Irish investors FL Partners, is eyeing up Ireland and Germany as it seeks to expand internationally.
FL Partners director Neill Hughes told the Sunday Independent that the business would have “as much capital as it needs” to progress its expansion plans.
Potensis specialises in recruitment for the housebuilding and construction industries.
London is suffering from a housing shortfall which FL believes should provide Potensis with opportunities for growth.
“We’ve got a lot of capital to spend but we want to make sure that we spend it in the right places. And we’ve been very careful about not buying something at the wrong time,” Hughes said.
“We have great ambition for the business, we think there’s some inherent organic growth in terms of what it can do better and bigger, and I think there’s some interesting acquisition opportunities. Our view would be that we’d want to scale this business pretty quickly, which isn’t the typical thing that we’ve tended to do but I think it sort of works here.
“In a UK sense we see lots of acquisition opportunities to bolt on to this platform in the UK, we are looking at a couple of things that are international, we’d be looking more at a business rather than a startup,” he said.
Potensis was founded in 2000 and clients include some of Britain’s top housebuilding plcs. Northern Irishman Steven Kirkpatrick is joining as chief executive after a 20-year career in recruitment.
“Specialist recruitment is the way the market has gone in the UK in the last 8-10 years. There’s been further specialisation in relation to understanding the candidate marketplace and how one construction director might be the right person for one build but would be completely the wrong construction director for another build ... it allows you to really offer value to the client,” Kirkpatrick told the Sunday Independent.
He named Ireland and Berlin as specific areas of opportunity for the business.
“If you take a look at any major European cities ... these are construction hotbeds. Younger people are being attracted to major capital cities around the world in terms of finding work, and when they arrive the infrastructure doesn’t support demand,” Kirkpatrick added.