POLISH pensions administrators, not plumbers, look set to becoming increasing common figures in the Irish labour market in the near future as a wave of prominent financial institutions look east to address the labour shortage gripping the sector.

All branches of the Irish financial services sector are actively recruiting from eastern Europe, ranging from retail banks such as Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB to specialist fund administrators based in Dublin's International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) such as State Street International.

A number of Irish recruiting firms are also becoming involved, most notably Grafton Recruitment, which has 23 offices in eastern Europe and plans to open another seven this year.

Although many of these offices were opened to service the local recruitment needs of multinationals, the firm's managing director for Ireland, Aine Maria Mizzoni, admitted they were increasingly being used to source staff for Irish financial institutions.

"The way it works is we sit down with the institution and get a clear idea of what they are looking for. We then talk with country managers in our network to work out where we can find these candidates, " she said.

"We will then actually go out of Ireland with the client and do the interviews, drawing up a shortlist etc and that will eventually move on to the issuing of offers to people."

Mizzoni said Grafton usually recruited several hundred people from eastern Europe, mainly from Poland and Lithuania, in this fashion each year. Most clients tended to recruit between 20 and 50 people in one trip. She said the people recruited in this fashion had identical terms and conditions to staff recruited in Ireland for the same positions.

"Employers are not seeking to bring in people to work at diminished rates of pay. What they are trying to do is to fill hard-to-fill jobs."

Gavin Nagle, head of business development at State Street International, a financial services multinational that has recently recruited staff from Poland for its Irish offices, also stated that firms were not trying to cut costs by recruiting from eastern Europe.

"The problem is that business is coming in to us quicker than the Irish education sector can pump qualified people out. Recruiting from abroad isn't as convenient as recruiting in Ireland but it's not as inconvenient as you think, " he said.

Nagle said State Street now employed 45 Polish nationals out of its total Irish workforce of 750 people. He said they were employed in highly-skilled jobs, including fund accounting and financial transfer handling.

"It's worked out great so far. In many cases, our Polish employees have much better language skills than you can get in Ireland, " he said.

Average salaries in Ireland are much higher than those in Poland, where workers are still typically paid around 590 a month, despite rapid economic growth.

The situation in the wealthier members of the eastern bloc is similar, even in the Czech Republic, where prices in tourist traps such as Wenceslas Square in Prague are often higher than in Ireland.

Just yards from these areas, it is still possible to buy a glass of beer for under 1 while many restaurants offer meals for less than 5.

This is hardly surprising, given that the country's average salary stands at just over 710 a month.

But Nagle insisted that eastern European workers were not simply being lured to Ireland by the offer of higher wages, although he conceded that "there may be an element of that".

"I would like to think there are more positive factors linked with lifestyle involved. I'm sure that Ireland's economic success has received as much coverage in Poland as in anywhere else."

However, many experts in the countries where the financial firms are recruiting disagree. Sandra Bitusikova, a lecturer in Slovakia's Matej Bel University and a research programme manager for the European Universities Association, said salaries were one of the main reasons financial services workers are migrating to Ireland.

"Young university graduates start with extremely low salaries in their countries, which makes moving more attractive for them and for the companies employing them, " she said.

Another factor is that many eastern European employees tend to prefer to recruit staff who have some experience working abroad.

"It's good for their CVs to work in Ireland and there are quite a lot of examples already of people who have moved back home after spending some time working abroad, " she said.

According to Bitusikova, the main difficulty the firms employing migrants face is education. Many eastern European school curriculums still date to the Soviet era, which "gives children quite a wide general knowledge but doesn't allow people to develop creative thinking".

She said this approach was rooted in Soviet ideology, which aimed to give a high standard of education while producing "unquestioning" students.

"It will take a few generations of people studying outside of the countries and coming back to change this, " she said.

The main uncertainty facing the Irish financial services sector, however, is the issue of how long employees sourced from eastern Europe will stay in Ireland.

Bitusikova said that, based on her conversations with her students, it was clear that "most of them would like to come back, especially the more educated ones. The less able ones just want to go and earn lots of money".

However, according to Milan Novak, Grafton Recruitment's country manager in the Czech Republic, the issue of how long people will stay is often linked to their nationality.

"Czech people traditionally would only go abroad for a certain period of time, which is interesting if you compare it to Polish people, who are more mobile and don't mind staying abroad, " he said.

"The Czech people have a stronger bond to their country."