Employers polish sales pitch in race for talent
Companies using myriad approaches to match people with careers
Anticipating that oilsands development will create 700,000 jobs in Alberta by 2035, energy companies are vying for the best people to fill the careers they’re selling.
“There is a crunch for talent,” says Jackson White, leader, talent management for Devon Canada.
“Organizations have had to move from a traditional human resources approach to, ‘How do we sell the organization?’ and ‘How do we resonate the brand so it distinguishes us, from a human capital perspective?’
“All companies are doing that. Companies are trying to sell careers.”
Corporate strategic plan in hand, Devon Canada, for example, estimates its workforce requirements five years out and designs an advertising campaign that targets candidates grouped by related disciplines and by demographics.
The initial campaign is broad, reaching the most senior people through traditional media; the midcareer cohort through job boards such as Workopolis and Monster; and the early career group through social media tools such as Linkedin, Twitter or Bing.
“To track emerging professionals, you can’t give them sheets of paper with job opportunities, you need something they can QR key to a smartphone and they’ll work it from there,” White says.
The rare paper resume submitted at a remote site is put into the company’s database.
It can then be screened electronically for experience or aptitude matches along with applications that come in through the electronic application tracking systems all companies now use.
Bundling disciplines allows the company to advertise where, say, engineers will be reached and to direct them to Devon’s corporate website.
Then through the course of a year’s advertising campaign, human re- sources and corporate communications together build up from their corporate awareness platform with targeted advertisements for a role as specific as “reservoir engineer in the thermal unit.”
Numerous third-party job boards scrape the job listings from Devon’s website and aggregate them for candidates to search by country, specialty, company or any other category the job board host can use to sell ads.
“It’s free publicity for us,” White says.
“(From) the major online aggregators like Google, where people key in word searches, we get reports so we can track and understand how candidates get to us — average number of clicks, for example.”
The need for expertise pushes companies to search beyond the boundaries of traditional oilpatch experience and outside the country.
They’re also becoming flexible about calling on senior expertise in other than full-time ways, and they’re snatching up promising university students.
“You can’t just buy expertise, so the emphasis is on how we grow our talent from within so talent doesn’t lose interest and exit the organization,” White says.
The provincial and federal governments both backstop industry’s recruitment efforts.
A provincial multi-stakeholder committee designed a strategy for Alberta’s energy sector, posted atemployment.alberta.ca under the link “building and educating tomorrow’s workforce.”
Ottawa funds the Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada, which provides resources for both employers and candidates.
Communications manager Jolene Varndell says the council has been working on linking its job boards and occupational profiles and career path descriptions at petrohrsc.ca.