Demands of Dell keep Casey running just to stand still

Pat Casey says he could have been a journalist, although it is impossible to detect any trace of regret in his voice. But it was a journalist who set him on the road to his present position of human resources (HR) director of Dell Computers in Limerick.

After doing Business Studies in Carlow RTC, and being leader of the students' union, he found he was the only male in a class of 19 females learning to type. An application for a Civil Service position which was automatically sent on from the class was rejected on the grounds of his sex. As a result, he featured in the women's page of the Irish Independent as the student who found discrimination could cut both ways.

He remembers being described as "lean, hip and curly-haired". "I doubt if it is true today," he says.

But Ford in Cork was sufficiently impressed to give him a call and he found himself working in industrial relations.

"I think I knew sufficiently about negotiations and influencing management or employees that that was something I enjoyed."

In a work environment dominated by middle-aged males, he was known as "the young fellow". He says he was still being called that seven years later, in 1984, when the plant closed.

In a reversal of age profiles, Mr Casey finds himself, in his early 40s, as the grand old man in Dell where the average age of the 4,300 employees is in the early 20s. His boss, Michael Dell, founder and chief executive of Dell Computers, is, at 34, somewhere in between.

Mr Casey says the direct selling model which Dell has pioneered, involving customers ringing the company for their order, has a big pressurising effect on the job, which he took up in October, 1998. Demand surges mean that "routinely" 100 staff must be recruited weekly. "We went this year from 3,000 people to 4,300. We need 4,500. We do not talk in tens, we talk in fifties and hundreds."

In the three months before Dell's third European manufacturing facility, known as EMF3, opened in October, 1,600 people were employed.

"The rate at which it comes at you in Dell is unbelievable. It is almost an avalanche."

The job demands innovation and quick thinking. A lottery has been organised, every possible method of advertising to recruit new personnel has been tried and suppliers' employees have been seconded to Dell on a temporary basis.

Prayer rooms and dietary needs have been organised for Muslim employees who travelled from a sister plant in Malaysia recently. Most recently, 112 Spanish undergraduates received nine-month contracts. Training manuals have to be translated into Spanish and supervisors need to be conscious of language difficulties.

A fortnight ago it was decided that each of the Dell employees, including 1,000 in the sales and marketing centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, would receive a hamper, presenting an immediate logistics challenge for suppliers.

"Everything we do is on a large scale," Mr Casey says.

Dell has been good for Limerick's education institutions. A series of collaborative programmes have been set up with the Limerick Institute of Technology and the University of Limerick, on whose board of governors Mr Casey serves.

Dell also has 180 students "on call", ready to come in on evenings or during the weekend.

In 14 months with the company, his proudest memory is of the successful start-up of EMF3, which is currently running at 50 per cent of its capacity. "The almost vertical take-off of EMF3 from nothing on October 3rd to over 4,000 units at the end of October is nothing short of a miracle."

The latest recruitment campaign began last week, involving television advertisements for the first time. Currently, local media advertising accounts for 85 per cent of calls. The new campaign is aimed at taking on more than 500 people by the end of January.

The recruitment call centre is open 24 hours a day in case "you wake up at 3 a.m. and decide you want a job in Dell".

Mr Casey says that every 6.5 calls received leads to one person being recruited.

"We track it by the hour. We know within a day of running a new ad, if it was an effective medium."

From Athy, Co Kildare, Mr Casey's first senior management job was just a few miles away, with Intel in Leixlip, in 1990 where the scale of the $2 billion (€1.9 billion) start-up operation was a good training ground for Dell. It was, he says, his "watershed job".

"At the time it was the most senior HR job available in Ireland," he says.

Before then, he had been unemployed for a while, and then worked for Shannon Development, Bausch & Lomb in Waterford and Apple in Cork. The HR manager's job he enjoys, he says, because "you can positively impact people's working lives while at the same time contributing, I think, to the bottom line".

He says that in a tightening labour market, HR managers need to be open and innovative to new ways of "recruiting, rewarding and developing people".

His move to Dell came after he had moved with Intel to Albuequerque in the US. There he was responsible for recruitment for Intel's worldwide wafer fabrication plants. He says that he, with his wife, Sue, decided to bring up their son, Donnchadh, in the Republic.

Now he is living in the relative calm of Co Tipperary, close to Lough Derg. But with a postal address of Killaloe (Co Clare), he is aware of being at a flashpoint of inter-county rivalry. But it is a safe distance from Limerick. He is able to commute to work in less than 40 minutes, arriving at his desk by 7.30 a.m. He works an 11-hour day and guards his weekends selfishly. "When you work in a fast-paced environment such as this, you have to recharge the batteries. . . My weekends are precious. You have to have some balance in your life, your family life, your health."