As the tech sector in Wales continues to thrive, Acorn, one of the UK’s leading recruitment specialists, has made a significant investment to its IT and Digital Team, appointing three new key members of staff.
It is estimated that over a million new recruits will be required to help bolster the tech specialist workforce by 2023 and as a result, Acorn’s niche IT and Digital Team is growing year-on-year to meet this demand.
Leroy Brito, from Cardiff, has over six years’ experience of IT recruitment and joins Acorn as the new lead recruitment consultant. Neil Clevett, Scottish born and previously a business development manager, has been appointed as the team’s newest IT recruitment consultant focusing on the expanding Cyber Security and Software Test markets. And Scott Brettle, from Neath, joins as specialist IT resourcer to support the team and develop key relationships with IT professionals looking for their next career move.
Leroy, Neil and Scott join Pavan Arora, head of contract recruitment, Ryan Lewis, resource lead, and Hannah Worthing, talent manager, who all form Acorn’s specialist IT and digital recruitment team, based in South Wales and managed by David Sadler, head of IT recruitment.
The team of self-proclaimed “tech geeks” live and breathe all things IT & Digital. They specialise in vertical markets giving candidates and clients a more specific service, and recruit permanent and contract IT professionals in anything from Developers to Infrastructure / Network Engineers, to Project Managers / Business Analysts and any other role that sits on the IT Project lifecycle.
With more and more tech businesses starting up all over the country, Dave and his team are the go-to recruiters for setting up, sourcing and relocating IT teams, and have been actively engaging in the community to promote Wales as a leading tech destination for many years.
In 2014 Acorn secured an exclusive contract to recruit 44 highly skilled IT professionals for London based Smartpipe Solutions’ move into Cwmbran, and since then they have developed and continue to recruit hundreds of IT professionals for companies across the UK.
Dave Sadler, head of IT recruitment for Acorn, said: “our team works extremely hard to meet the demands of the market. We’ve created key relationships with our clients to truly understand the level of candidates they need, and are constantly talking to high end developers, strong testers, cyber experts, cloud professionals and, with the most recent demand shift, DevOps engineers to support their career routes.”
Dave, who regularly gives advice to the Inward Investment teams at Welsh Government. added: “It’s incredibly important to appoint individuals who are capable of providing the specialist service our customers are used to; Leroy, Neil and Scott are the perfect additions to our team.”
As an extension to Acorn’s IT Recruitment Division offering, the company also provides IT recruitment and training opportunities, through IT Bootcamps, for companies looking to recruit trained software developers. Since March 2015, Acorn’s IT Bootcamps has successfully taken STEM graduates through a six-week training programme and placed them as skilled productive software developers into IT companies throughout South Wales. Now, due to industry demands, a new Cyber Security bootcamp has been developed and is ready to be introduced to employers looking to recruit trained penetration testers, malware experts and general cyber security professionals.
The IT Division is one of many specialist sectors Acorn works in. Other industries include Legal, Executive Search, Finance, Nursing, Driving, Construction and Technical and Engineering, all of which offer expert recruitment support across the UK.