The New Battle for Talent: Attracting Candidates in the Downturn

Still, Buck maintains, “if you want to market to the younger generations, you have to be where they are so that they can find you.”

Addressing Talent Challenges in the Downturn              

One of the challenges for HR and talent attraction professionals during the downturn is balancing far less recruiting while maintaining their companies’ brands.

Buck said it’s important to “recruit smarter.”

For example, “we’re not recruiting a lot of petroleum engineers right now, because they’re not able to find jobs elsewhere, so it’s unlikely they will leave the company,” he said. “Our accountants and IT people can leave us and find jobs [in other industries]. So we’re trying to build up our pipelines in those areas.”

He added that students may be hesitant to enter the industry or even change their majors. But he remains optimistic.

“The feedback we’ve always gotten whether the market was good or bad is college students want meaningful jobs,” Buck said. “They want to work on projects and be able to make an impact. And if you think about it, now is the perfect opportunity to make an impact.”

In regard to the reported impending skilled worker shortage in upstream, Buck said he didn’t know how much could realistically be done about it. However, he did say Noble was looking at how workers could transfer roles within the same company.

“I just hope we make sure our brand is good enough to attract people,” he said.

Rodriguez said Spectra Energy, which is in the midstream sector, sees more competition around the operations space. Her company is also looking at transferrable skills.

“From the operations side, we are looking at what can be transferred and leveraged to other sides of the industry,” she said. “This is where talent acquisition really gets to earn its pay. We have to start looking in different [places] or we’re going to be left behind.”