Why Do Laid-Off Oil and Gas Employees Need an Outplacement Firm That Knows Oil and Gas?

Most outplacement firms could not tell a lease operator from a landman, and the people they are paid to help find that out in the first session.

That is the problem nobody in an HR meeting says out loud. A company announces a reduction, signs with a national outplacement provider, and checks the box. The field technician gets a login to a job board and a coach who has never set foot on a well pad. The engineer gets a resume template written for a marketing manager. Three months later the contract ends, and many of those people are still looking.

Oil and gas has been through this cycle before, and at scale. In the first seven months of 2016 alone, energy companies announced 94,936 job cuts, up 37 percent from the same period in 2015, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas as reported by the ABA Banking Journal. The industry is consolidating again, and the people coming out of it deserve better than a generic program.

PRL International is a retained executive search firm serving Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, specializing in senior-level placements in energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing, and it offers outplacement only to the oil and gas industry.

What should outplacement services for laid off employees include in oil and gas?

Outplacement services for laid off employees in oil and gas should include a rebuilt resume written in the language operators hire on, one-on-one coaching from someone who knows the industry, and active marketing of each person to the companies that hire oil and gas talent.

Everything else is a delivery detail. The test is whether the program changes how hiring managers see the person, and whether anyone is putting that person in front of them every week.

Here is what a complete program looks like:

The last two rows are where most programs fall short. One of the largest national providers publishes an entry-level plan with four coaching calls over three months. That is a resume review and a goodbye.

Why does a generalist outplacement firm fail oil and gas employees?

A generalist outplacement firm fails oil and gas employees because it coaches them to compete in a general job market, when the fastest route back to work runs through a small network of operators, service companies, and adjacent industries that a generalist does not know.

We see the same three mistakes on almost every resume that comes to us from a generic program.

The first is translation. A completions engineer writes "managed field operations and improved efficiency." A hiring manager at an operator wants to read stage counts, lateral lengths, and what the person did to cost per foot. The work was real. The resume hid it.

The second is the certifications. A lease operator with H2S, SafeLand, and a Class A CDL is already qualified for pipeline, gas utility, and power plant work. Most bury those tickets at the bottom of page two, or leave them off entirely, because nobody told them those three lines are the reason they get the call.

The third is the map. A generalist coach sends people to job boards. Oil and gas hiring moves through relationships: the superintendent who needs a production tech next month, the service company winning a new contract, the midstream company expanding a gathering system. If the firm does not know those people, it cannot market anyone to them.

How do field technicians and engineers get hired again after an oil and gas layoff?

Field technicians and engineers get hired again fastest when their skills are mapped to the other industries that need them, not only to the next operator, and when someone markets them directly to those employers.

Oil and gas people are among the most transferable workers in the industrial economy, and almost none of them know it. Instrumentation and electrical technicians fit power generation and manufacturing. Pipeline and integrity engineers fit gas utilities. Facilities engineers fit the power plants and data centers being built right now. Engineering talent in particular is short across the country, and it is paid for, as our engineer salary report shows.

We worked with a geologist and geophysicist who was let go after his company was acquired. He had spent years helping build that company, and the first thing he said to us was that it felt like being abandoned by something he had helped create. The resume was not the first problem. The shock was. We spent the early sessions rebuilding his confidence before we touched a single bullet point. Then we cleaned up everything the market would see, put his subsurface work in terms a producer could weigh, and gave his record the shine it had earned. Finally, we took him to multiple producers directly instead of waiting on postings. He landed with a producer in Houston, and he is still there today. No job board found that role. Someone who knew which producers needed his skills put him in front of them.

The first two weeks decide most of it. A person who spends them rebuilding the resume, fixing LinkedIn, and agreeing on a written marketing plan is in front of hiring managers by week three. A person who spends them waiting for a coach to call back is still updating a profile in week six.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Gandalf says that to Frodo in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. Nobody chooses a layoff. What the person does with the next ninety days is the part they can still control, and a good program makes those days count.

How should HR choose an outplacement firm for an oil and gas layoff?

HR should choose an outplacement firm for an oil and gas layoff by asking five questions: how many coaching sessions each person gets, who delivers them, whether the firm markets people to employers or only coaches them, whether it knows the industry's hiring network, and whether you pay for people who never use the program.

The answers separate a benefit from a box being checked. Your people remember how the exit was handled long after they forget the severance number, and so do the people who stayed.

For how we run it, tiers and pricing from $3,200 per person, see our oil and gas outplacement program, built on the same network behind our energy executive search practice.

If you are ready to fill a senior role or want to talk through your search, reach out at prlinternational.com/contact

Want to know what questions to ask before hiring a search firm? Download the free 7-Question Guide: https://prl-proposal.vercel.app/guide