These aren’t your grandfather’s recruiting strategies. Indeed, everything about the job—and employee—hunt has changed in recent years, creating a new world of recruiting challenges for the energy sector. Gone are the days of red circles marking job leads in a newspaper’s classified section. The mailman is no longer counted on to deliver stacks of applications to hiring bosses. And likewise, job seekers aren’t spending much time sitting impatiently perched beside their rotary phones, waiting for them to make a noise.

The obstacles faced by hiring companies are numerous. For instance, there are discipline shortages— alongside age and experience gaps—as baby boomers prepare to exit the workforce. Meantime, competition among companies vying for the shrinking, available pool of candidates is mounting. As companies fight to snap up the best and brightest, salaries are spiraling to the point where they might someday be unsustainable. The perfect candidates, meanwhile, are proving elusive since many are already comfortably employed and not actively seeking work.

In response, companies and recruiting firms are taking on new tactics and turning to good, old-fashioned gumshoe sleuthing to find the best fits for the energy sector.

The hunt for employees is no time to be passive, says Jason McAuliffe, president of the Atlanta–based Energy Recruiters. Instead, he says, employers must be aggressive in their pursuit of the best and brightest candidates. This happens through networking, maintaining a solid base of contacts and constantly conducting interviews.

After all, he says, the perfect candidate could prove elusive. The trick, he adds, is to find candidates who are in the market as opposed to simply on the market.

“You have to be proactive,” McAuliffe tells Midstream Business. “The people our clients want to hire are most likely doing this role for somebody else. Unless they’re significantly unhappy about professional, personal or financial goals not being met, they’re not out looking for work. They’re not going to our clients’ job boards to see what’s posted. They’re not in job-search mode.”

Bridging the gaps

The type of employees being sought out is changing, too. The energy industry is observing a widening age gap between seasoned veterans and young professionals. This generational gap was brought on, largely, by the cyclical nature of the business. Companies tend to stop hiring in the bad times, while embarking on hiring binges in the booms. This has created an impending “brain drain” that has companies worried about how to best replenish institutional knowledge among the next generation of workers, says McAuliffe.

It is good news for the ambitious young folks working in the business. Companies are grooming their most promising young employees for future positions in leadership. This means greater opportunities for advancement and a chance to climb the corporate ladder at a faster pace.

“The $64,000 question is: Do they deserve it?” says McAuliffe. “And if you choose wisely, the answer is yes. But you have to hire for that and you have to develop internally for that.”

Edward Ogden has observed a similar trend in his role as Houston director of recruiting firm Spencer Ogden Oil and Gas. Ogden says he has seen some companies move people with just eight to 10 years of experience into management or mentoring positions. They’re forced to do so, he says, as they struggle to bridge the age and experience gaps in a competitive industry.

“Some companies wouldn’t even dream of this, but some of the smaller companies that may have struggled with hiring are maybe promoting people from within or promoting people earlier,” Ogden tells Midstream Business.

He’s noticed another hiring trend in recent years, too. More women are choosing to go into engineering, he says, which is helping bridge the gender gap that existed in previous decades. Of course, women are being drawn to the energy sector for the same reasons as men: the lure of plentiful jobs and generous salaries.

“The industry is more attractive than it probably was in the past for so many reasons,” says Ogden. “I think from a graduate perspective they’re quite confident because the jobs are there and the salaries are there, and they’ve now got a bigger pool to choose from. The industry is now more attractive to both sectors.”

Turning to the Web

Social media has made life a little easier for the likes of recruiters such as McAuliffe and Ogden. Online hangouts, including Facebook and Twitter, can be used to screen candidates for unsavory behavior, for example. In the world of recruiting, though, LinkedIn has become the network of choice for recruiters, job seekers and professionals looking to build connections. McAuliffe says he considers it a valuable tool, given the amount of prospective connections that can be made with the click of a mouse. It’s the only social network he uses.

“If it was mandatory for everybody to use it, it would be a very effective tool,” he says. “It is still useful, since for a relatively limited investment, you can get a lot of different names and enough information to reach out.”

LinkedIn has become a crucial part of Ogden’s recruiting strategy. Though it won’t eliminate old-fashioned headhunting, he says it’s an effective way of filtering through a younger generation of prospective employees. With millions of members, the site allows candidates to market themselves, creating a win-win situation for both them and recruiters.

“LinkedIn is an industry game-changer in my opinion,” Ogden says. “It is just such a powerful tool for a lot of our people.”

The wage war

For the most part, McAuliffe says salaries are remaining sustainable, though he has seen a few offers pass by his desk that has raised eyebrows. This is happening, he says, as can- didates start receiving multiple job offers, prompting them to work angles to earn the best possible salary. The trouble, he says, is that there are no guidelines on how the market should compensate engineers with certain skill sets. It is largely dependent on the candidate, client and how a particular offer is positioned.

“I don’t see it getting out of hand—yet,” he says. “I did see one offer the other day that was a little bit out of hand: More than $150,000 for a seven-year engineer. If this ends up being the norm, it could get interesting, because I don’t know what your return on investment is.”

Ogden says the wage war is posing challenges for companies and recruiters looking to snap up candidates who are already employed. This is because their current employers are clinging onto them, offering up promotions and higher salaries in order to keep those workers on staff. It’s easier for companies to extend greater salaries, Ogden says, than to lose a person and be forced to replace them. This problem has been especially troublesome in the upstream world, where geoscientists and reservoir engineers are in high demand. The fight to hang onto employees is driving up salaries tremendously.

“We know that the replacement cost of an individual can be nearly two times their basic salary,” says Ogden. “Therefore, to increase them by 20% or 30% makes financial sense to companies. It’s driving up an unrealistic salary in the mind of the person who is receiving it. It’s not a level playing field with the big companies and smaller companies.”

This is forcing companies to become more flexible, he says. For example, instead of offering the best salary, companies might instead offer candidates an opportunity for faster professional advancement. Or, he says, companies might become more lenient with candidates who aren’t necessarily a perfect fit for the role.

Creative solutions

In their quest to find the perfect candidates, many recruiters are getting innovative. They’re supplementing a U.S. workforce shortage with global talent from countries such as Australia, India and Britain. As well, companies are eying professionals from other disciplines who could have skills transferrable to the oil and gas industry. Increasingly, recruiting firms are looking to the military to fill positions.

Some specialist firms cater directly to veterans, while others hold regular job fairs to lure them in. NES Global Talent uses its network of connections to find candidates but is looking to strengthen its pool of former defense workers. It is currently working to create a separate business line that will help it better plug-in to job-seeking veterans.

Veterans are well-suited for oil and gas industry jobs for a number of reasons, says NES’ regional director Dane Groenveld. He says their strong technical skill sets make them prime candidates for roles related to logistics, mechanics and technical work. He adds that veterans are accustomed to working in hazardous environments and away from home.

“They’re accustomed to working in multicultural team environments and they’re culturally aware,” Groenveld tells Midstream Business. “They’re good team players, and they know how to follow procedure and protocol. Increasingly, all of those attributes are required for working in the oil and gas environment.”

The booms and busts

Though times are currently good, they’re not the best McAuliffe has seen. Since launching the recruiting business in 2001, he says the boom of 2005-06 was the strongest recruiting period he’s personally observed. Those happy years, of course, preceded the economic collapse of 2008. For now, it appears the challenging times have passed once again. Companies are investing heavily in infrastructure, and an endless assortment of energy-related jobs is emerging.

“2011 was good for us compared to 2008-2009, but 2012 was exceptional,” says McAuliffe. “Everything that I see indicates that 2013 should be better than 2012.”

While hiring is hot yet again, some can’t help but wonder whether another bust might be around the bend. It’s possible, of course, given the very nature of the energy business. Whether this latest round of jobs is here to stay has yet to be determined.

“History always repeats itself and companies will always try to be agile,” says McAuliffe. “They’re forced to be agile in order to survive. It’s better to have the company survive and adapt later than it is to have a great staff and all the right people and be bankrupt.”

Ogden, meanwhile, says he’s optimistic the jobs are here to stay.

“Obviously the oil and gas industry is going through a mini-boom at the moment, but these industries are cyclical and things can change,” he says. “But the demand for energy is huge.”

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