Attracting the top talent

Mahesh Puducheri, Senior Director for Talent at Halliburton, explains how he is building a long-term pipeline of engineering talent.

For Mahesh Puducheri, Senior Director for Talent at Halliburton, changing industry perception is fundamental in addressing the skills shortage in the oil and gas industry. He believes that in order to attract young talent to the industry it is crucial that the industry is perceived as the important, innovative and interesting workplace that it is. Puducheri believes that students are influenced by their university and therefore their faculty, and he has taken steps to work with the faculty in terms of projects, technology and development partnerships. In order to succeed in his mission, Puducheri is building relationships with universities. “By building more strategic education partnerships and working with key universities we are identifying the long-term talent pipeline.”

Eighteen months ago, Puducheri began targeting the key go-to markets, and chose specific universities in each of those countries, narrowing the list from 17 to six major countries that he was keen to focus on. “We are constantly in contact with these universities, helping them put together a curriculum architecture, so that the students have an expectation of the oil and gas services industry, and are well prepared to take on jobs within the energy industry,” he says. “We have a series of metrics that we work with on those schools, so we provide scholarships, or some of the faculty awards, which all comes into play, when you think about building a long-term pipeline of engineering talent.”

Puducheri believes that many students lack knowledge and exposure to the oil and gas industry, and perceive the industry as a low-tech, manual job. “It is changing,” says Puducheri, “thanks to the media and increased information about the industry. And we are working with companies, who are involved in perception surveys on campus, to talk about the current technology that the students who’ll be coming for work for us when they leave college.”

Puducheri is also keen to work on Halliburton’s college recruiting brand, ‘Go Further, Faster’. He wants the brand to define the engineering department and the graduates that he plans to hire from the various campuses. “We felt we should be in the campus, much before we show up to hire them, and that means we have to invest in understanding the perceptions and preferences of the college students, whether they are in the their first year or last year,” explains Puducheri.

Puducheri believes that it will take time for perceptions around the industry to change, but every effort is being made to convince students that they will be working with the very latest high-tech technology. He goes on to explain that he is also working to expose students to a more collaborative learning environment, as well as understand the needs of this new generation of students. “We are mapping their needs in terms of what we are doing in technology development areas, as well as from a development and improvement areas so that it really matches up to their needs,” says Puducheri. “Barriers are being broken. People are recognizing that they need to understand each areas input and that they are in the same environment, making decisions together as a team.”

Mind the gap

While Puducheri has seen huge amount of growth in students entering the industry since 2006 and 2007, many challenges remain around the skills shortage still seen in the oil and gas industry. Puducheri believes that universities are now stepping up to offer more courses at various levels; for example, some universities are discussing the possibility of a petroleum engineering undergraduate degree where they never had one before. “Universities have a key aspect to play in terms of long-term thinking,” he says. “They need to invest in the long-term. We are working with several universities to help them understand this and providing support to help them achieve it.”

Over the next five years, the gap between new graduates and experts leaving the industry is estimated at almost 500,000. Puducheri believes that it is vital that everything possible is done to close that gap. However, there is not just one silver bullet that can solve this potentially major problem. Firstly, Puducheri believes that companies should be investing in K to 12 education. He says that changing the mindset of potential employees to think of oil and gas as a clean and environmentally friendly industry is key.

“Knowledge transfer will also be a key issue that will help close the gap,” believes Puducheri. “Formal mentoring programs haven’t worked in the past, but perhaps encouraging informal mentoring programs, would work? I know there are some companies out there trying to tap into the retired population to create a network and people might want to remain engaged with the industry. As an industry we have to start thinking about the options we have on hand.”
 
Puducheri says that the knowledge management systems currently employed at Halliburton are “pretty good”; particularly in the way that knowledge is exchanged and transferred. He is currently working with companies who have already engaged in the retired network and is trying to find out the people who would be interested in coming back to work for Halliburton on a part-time, mentoring basis or on a contract basis in the training and learning centers.

He does say however, that Halliburton is already extremely involved in the K through 12 grades, and is focusing on making people available in the energy industry itself. “We have programs organized around brining students into our campuses and provide them input in terms of our oil and gas services lifecycle – we help them observe some of the jobs going on and give them some idea about this industry is going to be and what it is when it comes to reality in terms of getting exposed to elements and working with technology,” says Puducheri.

Talent pipeline

The knock-on effect of a shortage of skilled and qualified engineers can affect business in a big way. “If you think long-term,” says Puducheri, “the effects are going to be heavy – business is going to become harder and it will be much more difficult to find oil.” Puducheri sees some companies, who don’t have the right people in place, investing in technology and other assets as an alternative, but believes it is not going to solve the skills problem because it is people who run the technology and are key in bringing in their knowledge and expertise. “By bringing in more technology, the industry becomes more high-tech, therefore you need different types of people with different competencies and skills,” explains Puducheri. “Companies can and should invest and manage assets, but the biggest problem would not be investing in people. The company that gets ahead of investing in people, trying to attract, develop and retain the best talent is going to be the key winner.”

Once you have secured the talent it is vitally important that that talent is developed to its full potential. In the past the oil and gas industry has been slow to embrace the development and retention aspects of recruitment, but Puducheri sees this changing. “We’ve got to be able to attract the best fit for the job person and we should be able to continually accelerate the development,” he says. “Today, our focus is not just looking at people in terms of development. This is a bottoms-up approach that we use to identify key talent within the company. We have a formal success process, or talent review session, by which we identify key talent that are crucial to the success of this business, and who are going to be our future leaders.”

Puducheri goes on to explain that talent at Halliburton is identified through a process of leadership competencies that are assessed against each candidate. “We use a two-level process to talk about strengths and weaknesses, development areas and potential career moves. We do this in a very formal way, drilling down the entire organization,” explains Puducheri. “There’s a lot of commitment from the top, which helps, and a lot of focus on leadership development.”

After the talent has been identified, Puducheri explains that communicating is the second step to developing and retaining talent. When the top talent has been identified they progress through a number of programs, including a one-year leadership development course. These assessments and programs are formalized all the way though to executive development programs in order that people are able to progress quickly through different levels within the company.

“You can attract, you can accelerate the development, but you’ve got to retain,” says Puducheri. “The only way you can do that is to focus on the development, focus on the key talent, focus on the high potential and provide them challenging opportunities. That could be job rotation, working on different projects or it could be an overseas assignment, for example. There are different aspects to development, not just training, that we focus on very formally around identifying our top talent and focusing on development.”

Over the past few years, Puducheri has made sure that the system in place signifies that Halliburton’s retention processes are working, and that it communicates that to both potential and long-term employees. “Whenever we have key management positions come up, we go back to our succession charts and identify people who could replace those positions. We want to demonstrate that we are serious about leadership and management development,” states Puducheri.

Long-term thinking

Going forward, Puducheri is keen to make the systems side of processes more robust as well as continue to invest the same about of senior management time and energy. He wants to send a clear signal to people that Halliburton take the recruitment, development and retention of talent seriously. “As people come into supervisory roles we try to train them around the importance of evaluating talent and understanding the difference between performance and potential, so we prepare them for frontline thinking,” explains Puducheri. “The time we spend around people and development processes and talking about key talent in the company really pays off in the long-term, and that’s very important.”

Challenging times

In 2007, Halliburton hired around 14,000 employees globally. Hiring this amount of people could have presented some huge challenges, but Puducheri had a clear plan from the outset. “We knew we were going to grow based on the market and company indications. From a system perspective we put in a new system to help us identify the requisitions that we have across the global so that we could be able to better manager and monitor our metrics. And from a process perspective we invested more resources” explains Puducheri.

“We had to think outside of the box in terms of hiring people. We needed to keep work schedules flexible so we could attract and then keep the new employees. We have addressed every aspect of it, whether it’s going through our system, working with vendors to actually do a job posting or, getting the mindshare on the campus and identifying people and bringing them into the places where we have work.

“Our strategy from a talent management perspective is integrated and aligned to the business operations. That is how we make the business more successful.”

Work/life balance

Finding a work/life balance can be difficult, but Halliburton provides numerous benefits and resources to help find some balance:
Education: Educational reimbursements are related to job-related workshops, off-site seminars and courses taken at accredited educational institutions

Travel: With presence in around 70 countries there are many opportunities to work on interesting projects, experience new cultures and see the world

Health: A wellness program promotes health and well-being through customized solutions to help lose weight, qui smoking and get in better shape