Jobs Expo, the Irish recruitment exhibition brand that has brought more than 80,000 jobseekers face to face with employers over the past 14 years, has expanded into North Africa, as Ireland’s continuing skills pressures coincide with rapid growth in Morocco’s digital and outsourcing economy.
The Irish business, which has run careers events twice a year in Dublin, Cork and Galway since 2012 and which pivoted to online recruitment through VirtualRecruitment.ie during the pandemic, has taken that model to Casablanca through JOBEXPO.MA. The Moroccan operation combines physical recruitment events with a new AI-powered platform designed to allow employers to source, match, screen and interview Moroccan candidates remotely.
Jobs Expo Ireland is owned by Kevin Brannigan, with Bronagh Cotter serving as a director. It makes the Morocco launch the first international expansion by a well-established Irish brand with more than a decade of trading history behind it. The Moroccan operation is run through Dublin-headquartered Recruit.ie, which also organises BizExpo and Construction Jobs Expo.
The expansion comes as Morocco positions itself as a major international outsourcing and digital services centre.
Morocco’s offshoring sector supported 148,500 jobs at the end of 2024 and generated MAD 26.22 billion in service exports, according to the country’s Ministry of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform. The Moroccan Government is targeting approximately 270,000 offshoring jobs and almost MAD 40 billion in exports by 2030.
At the same time, Morocco’s wider Digital Morocco 2030 strategy aims to create 240,000 direct digital jobs and contribute MAD 100 billion to national GDP by 2030, illustrating the scale of the country’s ambition to establish itself as a regional digital economy and technology hub.
The opportunity comes as Irish employers continue to look internationally for skills. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment’s 2024 Annual Report records 39,400 employment permits issued in Ireland during 2024, including 17,167 Critical Skills Employment Permits. The Department has said international recruitment is being used to help address skills shortages in the Irish economy.
More than 6,500 employment permits were issued to ICT professionals in 2024, according to separate year-end figures from the Department, demonstrating the extent to which Ireland’s technology sector already relies on international talent.
Bronagh Cotter, a director of Jobs Expo and the founder of JOBEXPO.MA, believes Morocco represents a largely untapped opportunity for Irish companies looking beyond traditional international recruitment markets. “We have spent 14 years putting Irish employers in a room with the people they need to hire,” said Cotter. “Morocco has a highly educated, multilingual and increasingly technology-focused Jobs Expo | JOBEXPO.MA | Press release Page 2 workforce, yet it is a market that many Irish employers simply haven’t considered when looking internationally for talent.”
“Ireland has become extremely successful at attracting international technology businesses, but that success means employers are continually competing for specialist skills. Meanwhile, just a few hours away, Morocco is investing heavily in digital skills, technology, engineering and outsourcing.
“We don’t see this as replacing recruitment in Ireland. It is about widening the talent pool available to employers and giving companies another route to skills that may be difficult to source locally.
“What makes this particularly interesting for us is that we are no longer simply bringing employers and candidates together for one day at a recruitment exhibition. We have built the technology that allows those relationships to continue throughout the year.”
From a Dublin exhibition hall to a Casablanca platform
Jobs Expo launched its first Moroccan event in Casablanca in May 2025 before returning for a second edition on 25 July 2026 at The Venue Downtown. The latest event attracted 2,621 candidate registrations and more than 17 employers and organisations, including Bank of Africa, Konecta, Intelcia, Arrow Electronics, Transsion Holdings and Tectra Recruitment Maroc.
Rather than simply increasing ticket registrations, JOBEXPO.MA changed its candidate registration process for its 2026 event, requiring candidates to develop fuller professional profiles and upload CVs.
The move forms part of the company’s transition from an events-led recruitment business to a year-round technology platform.
Its new JOBEXPO.MA platform provides employers with an integrated recruitment workspace through which they can post vacancies, search a talent database, use AI-powered candidate matching to identify potential candidates, screen applications through an AI-supported applicant tracking system, and manage candidate pipelines, interview scheduling, feedback and offers through a dedicated hiring CRM.
The company says customer experience and multilingual support, IT services and engineering, and business process roles currently account for significant areas of candidate and employer activity on the platform.
Cotter said the change in approach means JOBEXPO.MA is increasingly measuring success by the quality and completeness of its candidate information rather than event registrations alone.
“Recruitment technology is only as useful as the information behind it,” she said. “We deliberately moved away from simply encouraging somebody to claim a ticket. We want candidates to build meaningful profiles and upload their CVs so employers have better information and our matching technology has better data to work with. “For an employer sitting in Dublin, the important question isn’t how many people attended an event in Casablanca. It is whether they can identify someone with the skills and experience they need, assess that person efficiently and start a recruitment conversation. That is the problem we are building JOBEXPO.MA to solve,” she continued.
Morocco’s challenge may be matching talent with opportunity
Morocco’s own employment figures point to another side of the opportunity.
The country’s Haut-Commissariat au Plan reported that labour-force participation among people holding advanced qualifications stood at 69.4% in the second quarter of 2026, while female labour-force participation was just 18.1%, compared with 66.5% among men. The HCP cautions that its new 2026 labour-force survey uses revised international definitions and is not directly comparable with previously published employment survey figures.
For JOBEXPO.MA, the figures reinforce the argument that part of Morocco’s employment challenge is not simply generating talent but connecting appropriately qualified people with suitable opportunities.
JOBEXPO.MA’s own platform data illustrates the point. Its year-round candidate database now holds more than 20,000 registered candidates, of whom approximately 68% — around 13,600 people — hold technical or technology-related profiles.
Identified roles within that pool include more than 1,500 engineers, almost 1,400 developers, 213 IT technicians, 172 data analysts, 146 data scientists, 93 DevOps professionals and 80 QA engineers, alongside close to 1,800 interns and early-career candidates entering the technology workforce.
Language capability is a further point of difference for employers recruiting into English-speaking or multilingual environments. Among JOBEXPO.MA candidates who have declared their language skills, 97.6% report English, 93.8% French and 82.6% Arabic, with Spanish, German, Amazigh and other languages also represented.
“That combination is unusual,” said Cotter. “You are looking at a technically qualified candidate who can very often work in English, French and Arabic. For an Irish employer running an international team, or for a business supporting customers across several European markets, that is exactly the profile that is hardest to find at home.”
The Moroccan Government is simultaneously accelerating investment in its digital economy. In June 2026, the World Bank approved a US$250 million Digital Transformation Acceleration Programme supporting Morocco’s Digital Morocco 2030 strategy, including measures intended to expand the digital talent pool, support AI innovation and generate employment in the offshoring sector.
An Irish brand abroad
Jobs Expo has run recruitment exhibitions in Ireland since 2012, holding events twice a year in Dublin, Cork and Galway. More than 80,000 jobseekers have attended. When Covid-19 halted physical fairs, the business launched VirtualRecruitment.ie, moving its events online and growing that platform’s user base beyond 10,000 users.
Founder Bronagh Cotter has more than 30 years’ recruitment experience, including 15 years with Careers Unlimited Ireland, and established JOBEXPO.MA in January 2024.
The Moroccan operation has already attracted international employers including DXC Technology, Glovo, Arrow Electronics, Alten Maroc, Intelcia, Konecta, Bank of Africa and Transsion Holdings across its Casablanca events.
Across the two editions to date, JOBEXPO.MA reports more than 5,900 registered candidates, 1,600+ on-site attendees, 1,200+ interviews and job conversations and more than 340 candidates progressed through employers’ recruitment processes.
The Irish connection has also received diplomatic support. Ireland’s Ambassador to Morocco, Helena Nolan, opened the July 2026 Casablanca event.
JOBEXPO.MA was also selected to participate in Morocco 300, the national start-up delegation at GITEX Africa Morocco 2026 in Marrakech, where it exhibited in the HR Tech category.
Cotter says the next stage is to introduce the Moroccan talent platform to Irish employers, “Ireland has decades of experience recruiting internationally, but international recruitment doesn’t have to mean continually looking towards the same markets,” she said.
“Morocco is geographically close to Ireland, operates within a very manageable time difference and has a growing technology and outsourcing economy. More importantly, there are ambitious, skilled people there looking for opportunities.
“We have already demonstrated that we can attract candidates and employers in Casablanca. The next stage is using the technology and the recruitment infrastructure we have built to create a genuine bridge between Moroccan talent and employers in Ireland and internationally.”