The job he decided not to take.
Thirty-five years ago Peter Casey was sitting in an interview, applying for a job. He did not get it, and he did not want it either. He had worked something out instead.
If he found that company somebody better than himself, they would pay him a fee for it. The fee would arrive faster than any salary, and he would get to do it again next month with a different company. He had been in the room to be hired, and he left it having realised he would rather do the hiring.
So he found them someone. They paid the fee. That was the end of Peter Casey’s career as a candidate, and the start of everything that followed.
A question in an elevator
He started his own recruitment business in Australia, working out of a rented desk in a Sydney office building. A man he shared the building with turned to him in the elevator one morning and asked, “Aren’t you the recruiter?”
He was. The man worked for a software company in the same building, one that was about to get very large. It was called Oracle.
That conversation became a partnership, and the partnership became a career. As the executives Peter placed at Oracle moved on to other companies, they took him with them. That is how he came to work with Ernst & Young, and with Coca-Cola, and with a good number of the consulting and software firms we still serve today.
Atlanta, 1996
Peter sold the Australian business and moved to Atlanta. In 1996 he started again from nothing, and called it Claddagh Resources.
It has been several different companies since. At one point Peter was running more than a hundred people. Today there are ten of us, and that is a choice rather than an accident. A small team where everybody knows every search in the building beats a large one where nobody does.
“I am running for President of Ireland”
In September 2018, Peter walked into the office and announced he was running for President of Ireland. The election was in October. Ryan was in charge now.
That was the whole handover.
Peter finished second with 23% of the vote, which is not bad for a man who had been running a recruiting firm in Atlanta a few months earlier. He is still our Chairman. Ryan has run the company ever since.
What changed after that
Ryan started using AI on his own searches, saw how many hours it gave back in a week, and then ran workshops to get everyone at Claddagh using it properly rather than poking at it alone. Today the whole team works that way.
We built our own tools on top of it. A matchmaker that reads a job description and tells us who in our database genuinely fits it. A candidate finder that runs the other way, taking a resume and telling us which of our open roles are right for that person. Both of them stop a candidate being sent a job they would never take, and stop a client reading a shortlist that was never really a shortlist.
None of it replaces the phone call. We do not make AI phone calls and we do not run AI interviews, and we have written down exactly where we draw that line.
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