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Development


Evolution Not Revolution


The energy industry is a tough playing field for a recruiter: a dramatic skills shortage, fierce competition for talent and a constantly changing geopolitical landscape, where projects and priorities can change overnight. In this challenging environment, Petrofac Group, a FTSE 100 company which designs and builds oil and gas infrastructure, and operates, maintains and manages hydrocarbon assets, believes developing capability internally is the best approach, and this starts with bringing in talented graduate recruits. But launching an international graduate programme is never easy, as Bob Gower, VP – Human Resources, Petrofac IES explains…


War for talent According to a recent report by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), employers have indicated that 17% of vacancies reported annually in the energy industry are ’hard-to-fill’, and 13% are ‘skills shortage vacancies’. We observe similar, or sometimes more extreme, shortages in other countries where we recruit.


In these conditions, growing own talent becomes a solution for long-term operational stability. This is especially applicable in emerging markets, where developing the next generation of energy workforce benefits not only Petrofac, but also our client and the industry as a whole.


A greater war for talent Our drive to hire local people wherever we operate is especially apparent in the way we run our graduate programmes. Parts of our organisation have well- established graduate schemes, having been hiring for a number of years. But with the introduction of a graduate programme into one of our newest divisions, Integrated Energy Services (IES), we were presented with a completely new challenge. The IES division, which is my HR remit,


26 Graduate Recruiter | www.agr.org.uk


functions in a new landscape: operating and managing oilfields which are either at the end of their production life (so called ‘mature fields’) or have not yet been tapped at all (so called ‘greenfield developments’). To maximise hydrocarbon production from such fields, strong technical expertise is needed in disciplines such as petroleum engineering, well engineering and geoscience (jointly known as ‘subsurface disciplines’).


Data: understanding the Petrofac offering


When launching a new graduate programme, the temptation is there to position the offering from the point of view of the recruiter – the view not necessarily aligned with what the real selling points are. To see where we really stand, we applied W. Edwards Deming’s famous recommendation ‘In God we trust; all others must bring data.’


Prior to the launch of the IES graduate scheme, a Group-wide project was undertaken to really understand our Employee Value Proposition (EVP). We looked into how our current employees have been hired in each country and why they saw Petrofac as a positive employer. While there were country differences,


the universal theme emerging was one of perceiving Petrofac as a place to develop and grow one’s knowledge and experience – the result of our wide project portfolio, employee mobility and the variety of technical services on offer. Influenced by these factors, our existing employees saw us as a great place to really fast-track their careers. Knowing that opportunities to grow, and grow quickly, are a priority for many graduates, we felt that we found the right messages to underpin our search for new talent.


The deeper you think When launching the recruitment campaign, we customised visuals and personal case studies for each country separately. But we branded it all with one strapline and theme: ‘The deeper you think, the more you achieve’. This ‘challenge’ hit the right note, expressing the sense of excitement of uncovering the mysteries of the earth, lying deep underground for agile and curious minds to explore.


The campaign, comprising press advertising, online presence and campus visits, was rolled out in Mexico and Malaysia, and resulted in excellent application numbers: 1400 in Malaysia


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