Is it the traditional model of Oil and Gas recruitment that's the reason the recruitment industry is getting a real hammering these days?

It begins with a mindset. The need to find someone to fill a role. This then brings around an approach that follows, a process of matching a CV to a job specification – Recruitment.

Focused on skills and tasks, based solely on the market value of those skills and tasks. That, ultimately, treats the person who has those skills as a commodity.

But who really questions this approach in a buoyant market where profit is the norm? Clients have no problem paying the high prices and are more than happy to pay even more to take the skills from their competitors. Candidates, at least those who have the in-demand skills are delighted at their ever-increasing commodity price.

Recruitment agencies just sit in the middle, happy to move people around for their fee’s.

Meanwhile, costs spiral out of control and projects remain half-finished as in demand people move forward. Expectations of rate increases becomes the norm; skills don’t improve or innovate because we are dealing with commodities and commodities don’t change in their nature.

That’s traditional recruitment in oil and gas and it must change!

Try starting with a different mindset? Defining a Key Appointment.

Here the focus is to know WHY you need this role. To do so a company needs to understand its own definition of SUCCESS, pick out clear objectives and have a high understanding on how their people fit to achieve these objectives.

Defining a key appointment transforms how you look at your people because it is based on exactly that, what makes the appointment KEY. Finding the right person means you must ask or be asked some difficult questions. Have the answers to these questions will mitigate the risk of getting your recruitment wrong.

Getting it right must include an evaluation of who you have already – do they match your vision of success; are they engaged with your business plan; can they step up?

Are you actively looking at succession planning; what innovations are your people driving in the business?

This isn’t a quick fix. It’s an investment plan into your business SUCCESS.

Unusually, for a business that could be seen to be in the recruitment market, at Maxwell Drummond we actively encourage our clients to work out whether their Key Appointment could already exist within their business. Investing in succession planning, a long-term weakness of the industry, will always be more successful than buying in the skills at high prices.

A Key Appointments approach means the last thing you do is go to the market to recruit, not the first thing but when you do, you seek out the best talent.