Just over one month on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, millions of people have been forced to leave their homes to escape war. They continue to flee, arriving in Poland, Moldova, Slovakia and further afield.

Ukrainian refugees are now settling in Ireland and the UK, for the time being at least. As they begin rebuilding their lives, they are faced with the prospect of finding a way of earning a living in a new country. Navigating a career change in a foreign country can be challenging at the best of times; for traumatised people who have been forced to leave their lives in Ukraine behind, the prospect of finding a job is doubly difficult.

Enter Tech Link Ukraine, a jobs resource for Ukrainians built by a group of entrepreneurs, including its co-founder Monaghan-based Neill Dunwoody.

‘It’s not your typical recruitment offering… there’s a whole different nuance to this situation; you have people that are coming out of a country that’s just been blitzkrieged’ – NEILL DUNWOODY

Dunwoody is a businessman specialising in talent acquisition. He runs his own healthcare start-up Spryt and works in an advisory capacity for Galway drone delivery start-up Manna. He is also managing director of Titan Talent Services.

He saw an opportunity to use his expertise to help Ukrainians one day a few weeks ago when he met a Ukrainian woman looking for work in the Monaghan co-working hub he was working in.

Using his industry connections, Dunwoody helped the woman get a job. She had worked as a lawyer and a graphic designer in Ukraine. He realised that there would be thousands more like her also looking for jobs here. He co-founded Tech Link Ukraine and he has since lost count of the amount of people he has been able to help as part of the network.

“It’s not your typical recruitment offering,” Dunwoody tells SiliconRepublic.com. “Anybody that works in recruitment will tell you how hard it can be to actually find really skilled individuals and talent. But there’s a whole different nuance to this situation; you have people that are coming out of a country that’s just been blitzkrieged.”

A lot of Ukrainians are coming in to countries where they don’t know anyone and where they have nothing, he adds. Many are women with small children, who need to be taken care of. They have had their bank and online accounts frozen, so even accessing their CVs can be impossible.

“If you do hire people like that, you need to be able to give them that leeway,” Dunwoody says, explaining that people need flexibility to think about all the things they need to do in order to begin getting themselves a job to support themselves and their families.

Some employers are paying for workers’ flights to get to wherever they are being hired from if they have to come from somewhere else like Poland or Slovakia. Others pay for hot desking facilities and places to work, or they agree to pay rents for a few weeks while the workers get themselves set up in their new country.

Signing up for the website is completely free, but Dunwoody says employers are asked to make these financial commitments to help people initially.

Dunwoody says he has “been shocked by people’s generosity” since he began the voluntary project. Through his business network, Tech Link Ukraine will be able to provide apartments to Ukrainian families free of charge during the Summer months when the students ordinarily using them will be gone.

Tech Link Ukraine has also joined forces with other organisations working on similar projects for refugees such as Remote For Ukraine and Tech Fugees. It is also working with charities on the ground such as the Red Cross and Ukraine tech organisation IT Ukraine.

‘We ran the numbers; there’s about 250,000 tech specialists there – or were there and it’s growing by about nearly 25pc each year’ – NEILL DUNWOODY

Dunwoody is not interested in working with anyone out to make a profit, he says. Remote For Ukraine, like Tech Link Ukraine, has built an AI informed platform where people can build their profile and download their CVs directly from the website. They can then go about applying to jobs and they are matched with employers based on their profiles and what kind of work they are looking for.

“On average we’re getting 5,000 candidates a day,” says Dunwoody. The candidates have done thousands of live interviews with the more than 1,000 employers currently on the site so far.

In an effort to help as many people as possible the platform is growing to include other sectors. Dunwoody says there has been interest from companies operating in sectors from floristry to medicine. Around 85pc of all the candidates applying are women.

Ukraine has a huge amount of talented tech professionals, particularly in frontend and backend development, says Dunwoody. He is already familiar with the country as a tech hub in his work as a talent acquisition specialist.

“We ran the numbers; there’s about 250,000 tech specialists there – or were there,” he says. “And it’s growing by about nearly 25pc each year. A lot of that will be graduates going into tech, but there’s a lot of Russians in tech in Ukraine who would have moved because there was better roles, better salaries at the time.”

‘I’ve always been a believer that the more multicultural your society, the better your society’ – NEILL DUNWOODY

Dunwoody says he knows people in Ukraine and knows the area. He has had some people ask him why he did not set up a similar initiative for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.

“I would do it for Syria and Afghanistan if the Irish Government or the European Union came around and waived the work permits and visas,” which they have done for Ukrainians. People fleeing the country can apply to live and work in the EU for up to three years under the EU’s emergency response plan. According to Dunwoody it takes up to 12 weeks at the very least to hire someone into Ireland without those waivers in place.

He points out that he started the project with the goal of helping “even one person.” As the initiative has grown at such an unprecedented rate, he is no longer involved in the tracking. He spends his time liaising with employers and connecting other people with resources and the willingness to help.

Last week, he exhibited at Talent Summit in Dublin and signed up more than 160 employers in just one day.

“The hardest thing is not the jobs,” Dunwoody explains. “The jobs are the easy part because everybody and every company wants to help. The hard part is connecting and signing Ukrainians up. We don’t find them, we just signpost and hopefully they’ll come to us.”

So far, he said, the group is happy with what it is achieving and the support it is getting. He lists support from companies such as Avanade and Microsoft which are both helping the site to build the backend CRM to accommodate the influx of traffic. A PR agency in the UK, Bright, is also giving them its time for free.

On the day of the Talent Summit, so many people signed up that Tech Link Ukraine’s website crashed. Luckily, Amazon gave them 250,000 credit on AWS so they could get more bandwidth.

Dunwoody wants others to get involved, too. He said that access to bank accounts is a very pressing problem for many Ukrainians coming here and as Ireland accepts more and more refugees, the issue will compound.

Dunwoody believes that ultimately our acceptance of Ukrainians will “bring our society up.”

“I’ve always been a believer that the more multicultural your society, the better your society,” he says. “Certain people aren’t happy with what we’re doing, they say you’re taking Irish people’s jobs or English people’s jobs but that’s just part and parcel; it just goes along with it… If you’re not willing to do it, don’t do it but my attitude is you have to do it. For me, I didn’t have a choice, it was either do it or…”

Dunwoody trails off, briefly contemplating the alternative.

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