Our Skills Pool is open for business!

We’re proud to announce that we’ve published the web-based sign-up registration for our skills pool database. Drillers.com has had a job pool candidate database for more than two decades. As the current owners, (Relentless Pursuit of Perfection Ltd. or rp²), we have been providing occasional ad-hoc workforce services for almost as long. The majority of short-term job contracts were related to coaching and training, but we have also helped many people get work over the years.

Now, we’ve combined the network of the drillers.com, and our rp² human resource capabilities to create a new service offering. The traditional method of companies advertising jobs, and candidates applying for them isn’t likely to go away any time soon. However, we believe that a highly qualified skill pool database offers tremendous benefits over the traditional model.

We aim to be able to put together competency-based teams, with each person chosen for their specialist skills, rather than their previous job titles. Also, we’ll be able to find individual team members to fill any skill gaps that employers and project managers might have. We’ll do this by focussing on what matters – the level of competency for the specific assignment.

With new enhanced exploration and extraction techniques, as well as the expansion of renewables, we see an increased demand for cross-functional job fulfilment.

For employers or recruiters:

The process of advertising a job posting, then the rounds of applications and interviews is expensive and time-consuming. Getting access to a pre-qualified person with the specific skills and experience needed is accomplished in a matter of days. This benefit gets magnified if the work is short-term, temporary or ad hoc.

For candidates:

The task of scouring job boards, reaching out to your network, and applying for one job after another can be soul-destroying. We know that our industry is cyclical. Industry growth and retraction can be national, regional or sector-specific (e.g. land vs deepwater). Wouldn’t it be better if firm and immediate job opportunities are brought straight to you? In many situations, the job will be ready to start, and there would be little or no competition for the position. You’ve worked hard to get the level of knowledge and experience you have, why should you chase dozens of possibilities?

Future proof model:

The oil and gas industry has always produced jobs that are by nature ad hoc, highly skill-specific and transient. Oil and gas companies do their best to keep top talent in house, but the reality is that there has always been a strong demand for experienced specialist consultants.

The current trends in human resources and advanced technology are likely to continue to affect you as an employer or expert worker:

1. Average job tenure rates keep shortening.
2. Agility and flexibility are personal attributes that continue to be in-demand.
3. Disruptive technologies create some jobs and make others redundant.
4. Increased worker preferences of entrepreneurship, career breaks, and the gig-economy mean that flexibility gets valued by all sides.
5. The sharing of expertise between analogous fields in different industries.
6. Expansion in the number of skills and niche sub-sets as new exploration and extraction techniques are adopted.
7. More operations are project-based, where a team of people with specific skills get pulled together, rather than static job descriptions.

We could go on, and although the oil and gas business can often be late adopters of technology (e.g., AI and big data), the next few decades are likely to see progress continuing to accelerate.

For candidates, how would commercial super-speed travel at twice the speed of sound affect your job opportunities? (We might be just four years away from that, London to New York in 3.5 hours).

For employers and recruiters, what happens when the oil and gas jobs market tightens up, and you need to put in a tender with highly technical people? How long does your current HR process take? What if competing tenderers are chasing the same person?

We’re currently accepting candidates to our skills pool database. The employer promotion will start in the coming months, once we see that we can cover most enquiries. We’ll invite companies to access our skills pool, but will also employ people directly in conjunction with our activities at rp². We continuously work with operators and service companies all over the world. We’ve just launched our well management service, and anticipate workforce demands that result from our bespoke training courses.

To qualify for our skills pool, you need to be highly skilled in between one and five specific skills. These are NOT job roles, but practical skills required within functions. For example, you wouldn’t qualify as just a drilling engineer, but with five years of experience in HPHT, then you would. Being a fluids engineer doesn’t count but being an expert in proppant formulae would.

You’re more than welcome to be listed on the skills pool and the jobs pool.

If you’re already registered as a candidate and want to get considered for our skills pool, then register on the skills pool. If you’re going to go straight to the skills pool, then that’s fine too.

After registration, you’ll receive a follow-up email, and are welcome to reply with any questions.