Looking for oil field employment but still haven't gotten any decent interviews? You're in the same boat as most job-seekers. In a shrinking economy, even roustabouts with 20 years experience can't easily get an oilfield job. The problem with 80% of job seekers is they limit themselves to only these 5 things:
- Send their resumes to free online job boards (e.g. Monster)
- Send their resumes to recruitment agencies (many job advertisements are made through recruiters)
- Registered themselves with their local unemployment office
- Searched the websites of large oil companies (e.g. Shell and ExxonMobil) for oil job vacancies
- Looked up job advertisements in the newspaper
If you haven't taken the above steps yet, then quickly finish them off. They are not complex or time-consuming, don't do any harm, and might even produce some results. But with most of your competitors for jobs in oil field also doing these same things, your chance of success is rather poor unless you have a lot of relevant experience.
When the economy is doing well, these methods work well enough. However, you need to do more in a recession. If you want to get hired fast, you need to model your actions on the successful job-seekers. So, how do they get hired fast for oil field jobs?
If you talk to successful job-seekers, they will tell you that they do a lot of leg-work. They drive to all the local oil fields and talk to the drillers, toolpushers and people who make the hiring decisions. Recession or not, there are still people who voluntarily leave their oil field jobs - some for personal reasons, others for health reasons or even something else. Since they talk to the people who need workers immediately, they get to bypass the human resource staff.
That's not all. The successful job-seekers also spend time at the bars where oil rig workers hang out after their work ends. They make friends with these workers, buying them beers and talking to them. This gives them first crack at getting an oil rig job.
Successful job-seekers know that most of the hiring for oilfield jobs come from smaller oil service contractors. So they directly contact these small companies, completely avoiding the recruitment agencies. Since small companies rarely have websites, they get the phone numbers and addresses from the membership directories published by business bureaus and trade associations in the oil industry. Very few job seekers do this, so they get to avoid a lot of competition for oil field jobs.
A good fisherman who catches a lot of fish goes to where the fish swim. He does not go where all the other fishermen hang around. When you look for
oil field employment or
offshore oil rig jobs, you need to behave like a good fisherman. Otherwise you will go home empty-handed and hungry.
