If you want a new job in Ireland, PayPal is probably a good place to start looking. As has been widely reported, the company is engaging in some massive expansion and will be hiring 1,000 new Irish staff over the next four years, mostly for its new site in Dundalk, Co Louth, which will open in July 2012. This is the biggest jobs announcement in Ireland since 2007.

Recruitment will apparently begin in July itself and 300 staff will be in situ by the end of the year. Who will they be? Not only programmers, but operations, compliance and risk professionals, all of whom will be drawn from the broader Irish financial services industry.

What kind of people does PayPal like to hire? A brief perusal of its website suggests it helps to be enthusiastically sporty or heavily passionate about something outside work: almost everyone stresses their extra-curricular interests.  PayPal’s European director of innovation is especially into motorbiking.

It will also help if you’re multilingual: Paypal’s operations in Ireland will deal with customers speaking 14 different languages.

If you make it to interview, expect a rigorous from people across the company: PayPal operates a 360 degree interview process.  The company may also employ cryptic questions in the style of Google.

Former applicants claim to have been asked things like: “There are 10 weights, two of which weigh less than the others. What can I do to identify the defective ones?”