Natural Resources Human Capital Challenges in North America

The global Natural Resources market is nearing a critical tipping point. Russ Buckland, managing partner of TRANSEARCH in Canada and global co-leader of the Resources, Energy and Inftrastructure practice for TRANSEARCH International, says he sees some incredible challenges ahead for North American and global employers in the oil, gas and mining sectors in the months and years ahead.

These new pressures are being driven, he says, by the acceleration of major merger and acquisition activity, a so-called commodities market “super-cycle” that continues to drive the price of oil, base metals and gold, and a demographic shift that will put an equally high premium on talent.

“The biggest issue facing the Natural Resources market is a shortage of talent in all positions and that’s being driven by Baby Boomer retirements and a lack of talent acquisition in the down times of the 1980s and 1990s, around the time when I presented a paper at the CIM asking, ‘Where Has All The Talent Gone,’” Buckland says.

Buckland explains that there is a huge gap in the Natural Resources workforce globally and that the shortage of talent is especially acute among workers ages 30 to 45. That’s because of the business cycle and how it has pushed companies to hire only in fits and starts, because of consolidation and an overall “lack of feeding the talent pipeline previously.”

“The war for talent between the companies is intense and compensation is being driven upward,” Buckland says. “People don’t want to join losing companies, so companies have to have a strong overall position to attract the best talent,” he contends. “Talent acquisition and retention has to become a strategic imperative for natural resources companies. If they don’t, those companies won’t attract the right people, they won’t keep people and they won’t compete for the best.”

Buckland says that natural resources employers around the world have to change the way they do business with prospective recruits, current employees and their high performers in order to maximize the effectiveness of their workforces and drive consistently high profitability.

“They have to start thinking about being more innovative and creative in how they look at acquiring talent,” he says. They also have to ensure that the talented professionals and managers they recruit into their organizations land smoothly in their new roles, stay long enough to deliver a return on the company’s training investment and reach their full potential.

But creating a new approach to sourcing, attracting and building a natural resource company’s human capital will require a significant dosing of change from today’s status quo. “Executive search is generally a reactive business. I’m suggesting we need to turn the paradigm completely upside down. Companies and search firms alike have to start thinking more proactively about talent,” Buckland asserts.

Revealing himself as a “true Canadian”, Buckland says that natural resources companies should think like a professional ice hockey team. Such teams, he says, take a long-term view of organizational success and invest time, energy and capital on talent scouting to develop a roster of potential backups for each and every one of its first-team players.

That’s critical to meeting the future workforce demands of many natural resources companies, he argues, because change is inevitable and, given the planned retirements of so many business leaders across the industry in the coming years, you just can’t bank entirely on your existing roster of key performers.

“Some of your current people are going to get recruited out and some are going to see their ability peak out,” Buckland says. “Further, some of the successors behind your current leaders may not be ready or may not want to move if they’re asked to relocate. So you’ve got to get to know people you don’t already know. You have to develop key relationships with people not currently a part of the company. That’s how you hedge your bets on your current people and build the pipeline of leaders for the future.”

By identifying potential professional and management recruits and building a relationship with them before you may wish to hire them, Buckland says, natural resources companies can dramatically reduce time-to-hire and “cycle time for replacement.” They can also gather important market intelligence that can inform not only recruitment strategy, but corporate strategy as well.

The candidates with the best credentials are increasingly expecting to learn and know far more about prospective employers than ever before. Top talent will gravitate to natural resources companies that are proactive about talent acquisition and develop a relationship with them to help educate them about their markets, competition and new opportunities. In other words, talented people want to see prospective employers invest time with them, and that’s so vital because they have an increasing number of employment options to consider and the winners in the war for superior natural resources talent will be those that differentiate the recruiting process.

“In the past, people needed companies. Today, companies need people, so the nexus of the relationship needs to change,” Buckland says.

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