BOARDROOM · News Beast · FreeMalta.com
Recruitment · May 2026
The People Who Move Malta
They never appear in the headlines. They don't need to. Every career that changed direction, every company that found the person who saved it, every professional who finally landed where they belonged — someone made a call. These are the ten people in Malta who make that call. We didn't look for the biggest LinkedIn profiles. We looked for the ones whose judgment actually matters. Ten names. One island. The real picture.
10 people
Written by
Anneli Nilsson
Founder & Managing Director · Job Matching Partner
Anneli Nilsson founded JobMatchingPartner in Malta after 20+ years in recruitment and a career that took her from Sweden to the UK, Costa Rica and back. She has been placing people in iGaming since 2005 — before most of the industry knew what iGaming was. Her firm recruits globally across iGaming, fintech, digital marketing and crypto. She speaks Swedish and English fluently and can review CVs in seven other languages.
"The measurement of success to me is the person who says I had a positive impact on their life. If I can do that every day, I cannot think of another job I'd rather have."
Harvey Specter Jr.
Anneli Nilsson has been placing people in iGaming since before the house understood it was building an empire. Twenty years of watching an industry grow from nothing into everything, and she measures success not by the billion-dollar companies she's helped staff but by the individual lives she's changed. That's either the most expensive way to think about recruitment or the only way that matters — and after two decades, she's still choosing the expensive way.
Marco Lia
Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist · Castille Malta
Marco Lia spent 14 years in banking before discovering that the real power in financial services isn't capital — it's the people who manage it. He retrained as a recruiter, specialising in Risk & Compliance, Financial Services and Audit, and has since placed CFOs, Group Heads of Compliance and General Managers across Malta's regulated sectors. In 2025 he was named in the Top 15 Recruiters in Malta. He speaks English, Maltese and Italian.
"My job isn't just to move CVs. It is to protect our clients."
Sophia Borg
Marco Lia understands something most headhunters miss — in Malta's financial services sector, a bad hire isn't just expensive, it's existential. When you're placing someone who will sign off on AML protocols or explain leverage ratios to the regulator, you're not trafficking in talent, you're trafficking in trust. Fourteen years inside banking taught him that compliance isn't bureaucracy — it's the difference between keeping your license and losing everything.
Fran Moisa
Headhunter · FM Search
Fran Moisa founded FM Search as a one-woman band — deliberately. London-trained, Malta-refined, she runs hyper-personalised executive search across the island with one point of contact: herself. She has lived in Malta for over 10 years, placing mid-to-senior leaders across regulated industries. Her LinkedIn is required reading on Fridays.
"Because hiring is human, I am committed to transforming the experience for candidates and companies."
Elena Vella
Fran Moisa runs FM Search like a dinner party for two — herself and whoever needs exactly the right person for exactly the right role. She chose to stay small in a world obsessed with scaling up, understanding that executive search isn't about algorithms or databases, it's about reading the room and knowing which conversation will change everything. Watch her work: she doesn't just match CVs to job descriptions, she translates between the language companies think they want and what they actually need to survive.
Martin Smith
Talent Acquisition Specialist · AX Group
Martin Smith spent over a decade at deVere Group, the world's largest independent financial advisory firm, rising to Senior Global Recruitment Manager and placing talent across 50+ global offices. He brought that perspective back to Malta — first at Manpower, now at AX Group — where he leads talent acquisition across Hospitality, Care and Construction. 13 years in recruitment. One consistent philosophy: the best conversation starts when there is nothing to sell.
"The best time to build a bridge is before you have a river to cross."
Gabriel Fenech
Martin Smith built his career on a counterintuitive truth — that the best recruitment happens when you're not recruiting. Thirteen years placing talent from deVere's global network to Malta's corporate corridors taught him that relationships are infrastructure, not transactions. At AX Group now, he still operates by the bridge principle: cultivate the connection before you need the candidate. It's the difference between headhunting and talent archaeology.
Dorianne Mifsud
Recruitment & HR Operations · Job Matching Partner
Dorianne Mifsud joined JobMatchingPartner in 2021, bringing with her a background in the public sector before making recruitment her full-time calling. She specialises in iGaming, FinTech and Tech — placing QA engineers, developers, UX designers and digital professionals across Malta's most competitive hiring market. Fluent in Maltese and English, she works inside Anneli Nilsson's team with the same philosophy: not just matching CVs, but building careers.
"We don't just match CVs — we build meaningful connections."
Isla Camilleri
Dorianne Mifsud left the safety of public service to enter Malta's most brutal hiring battlefield — tech recruitment, where developers ghost interviews and QA engineers vanish mid-process. She doesn't chase LinkedIn profiles; she maps the invisible architecture of who actually wants what, who lies about salary expectations, who will leave after six months. In a market where everyone promises "career building," she's one of the few who means it.
Jean Vella
Senior Recruiter · Hireroo
Jean Vella is part of the new generation of Maltese recruiters — the ones who grew up inside iGaming rather than arriving from outside it. At Hireroo, one of Malta's freshest recruitment outfits, he has built a track record placing roles across all levels of the international iGaming sector. He responds when you message him. In a market where ghosting is a professional habit, that alone sets him apart.
"My goal is not just to match candidates with roles but to forge connections that lead to mutual growth and success."
Dua Mifsud
Jean Vella belongs to the first generation of Maltese recruiters who understand iGaming as a native language rather than a translation exercise — he grew up inside the industry instead of trying to decode it from LinkedIn profiles and buzzword bingo. In a sector where most recruiters treat candidates like database entries and employers like commission machines, he actually responds to messages, which in Malta's recruitment landscape is practically revolutionary behavior.
Victoria Petrova
International HR & Recruitment · Broadwing Recruitment
Victoria Petrova holds a Master's in I/O Psychology from Sofia University and applies it daily at Broadwing, where she handles international HR and recruitment with psychometric testing as her secret weapon. She came to Malta from Bulgaria, bringing with her a framework that treats hiring as a science and people as its most interesting variable. She writes about work the way someone does who has actually read the research — and still finds humans more complicated than the literature suggests.
"You're only wasting time if you are still hiding the salary."
Sophia Borg
Victoria Petrova quotes Jung and hires like she's conducting an orchestra — every role needs its specific temperament, every team its particular chemistry. She moved from Sofia to Malta with a suitcase full of psychometric frameworks and discovered that Maltese workers, like everyone else, lie beautifully in interviews but reveal themselves completely in how they handle the third difficult question. The salary transparency isn't progressive politics for her — it's basic respect for people's time, which she considers the only currency that actually matters.
Francesco Tuia
Managing Director · Recruiter4You
Francesco Tuia founded Recruiter4You after 15 years moving through HR — temporary recruitment, Senior HR Manager, Head of HR for online companies, then out on his own. He holds a degree in Occupational Psychology from the University of Pavia and a Master's in HR from ISTUD Milano. He has led recruitment projects across Europe, GCC, APAC and Africa. Fluent in English, Italian and Spanish. Small firm, global reach, direct search only — no waiting for applicants.
"We are small, agile, and effective. We don't wait for applicants."
Ryan C
Francesco left corporate HR the moment he realized he was better at finding people than keeping them. Fifteen years climbing ladders taught him that the best talent never applies — they're already working somewhere else, usually unhappy, waiting for someone smart enough to find them. His firm stays deliberately small because he learned in Dubai that size kills speed, and in recruiting, three days late might as well be three months.
Emanuel Zammit
Recruitment Director · GCS Malta
Emanuel Zammit studied EU and International Politics with the intention of becoming a politician. He ended up in recruitment instead — and has spent 9 years discovering that placing the right person in the right role is its own form of public service. As Recruitment Director at GCS Malta, he runs an office that rings a bell every time a placement is made. He married his best friend last week. The Douro Valley photos were excellent.
"Find your purpose. Create your own dent in the universe."
Marcus Azzopardi
Emanuel Zammit wanted to fix governments but discovered something more precise: fixing the match between ambition and opportunity. Nine years in recruitment taught him that the right person in the wrong seat destroys more value than any policy failure — and that a bell ringing in a Maltese office when someone finds their place might be the smallest, most honest form of public service there is.
Simon Pace
Talent Account Manager · iTalent Plus
Simon Pace has been placing talent in Malta's most competitive sectors — iGaming, Payments, Finance, Legal and Compliance — long enough to remember when recruitment meant newspaper ads and printed CVs. He watched the whole industry transform and adapted faster than most. His LinkedIn is a quiet counter-narrative to hustle culture: it's OK to have gaps, it's OK to leave, it's OK to say no. In a market that rarely says any of those things out loud, he does.
"Don't let 40 hours a week have a negative effect on your persona or the relationship with your dear ones."
Alexandre Noir
Simon Pace operates in Malta's most cutthroat hiring sectors — iGaming, finance, compliance — where recruiters typically feed on desperation and sell dreams at markup. Instead, he's built a practice around something radical: telling people it's acceptable to have boundaries. In an industry that commodifies ambition, he's the rare operator who understands that sustainable careers aren't built on the wreckage of everything else you care about. He's not just placing talent — he's quietly teaching an entire market that saying no is a professional skill.