I’ve received an interesting email from Orion Group, one of the largest manpower supply agencies in the oil and gas business.<\/p>\n
Dear Engineer<\/p>\n
Important information regarding ‘QED International (Oil and Gas) Nigeria Ltd’<\/p>\n
“Before you accept any potential assignments with them, I thought you should know that Orion Group have issued invoices to QED International (Oil and Gas) Nigeria Ltd totalling a sum over $700,000 dating back to February 2009 which remain unpaid.”<\/p>\n
Alan Savage, Chairman, Orion Group<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This doesn’t surprise me in the least.\u00a0 I spent a lot of time over the past few years watching these agencies, and even had a spell working for one of the largest (not Orion) last year.\u00a0 In my opinion, they are often represented by the industry equivalent of the second-hand car salesman.\u00a0 Typically, you will sign up to their website and post your CV.\u00a0 You will apply for one or two of the positions advertised and never hear anything about this again.\u00a0 However, a month or two later you will get an email or phone call from them about some job in Saudi Arabia, details of which are non-existent.\u00a0 They can’t even tell you who the client is, what the rotation is, or give even a basic job description.\u00a0 But they will ask you for your expected salary and your current salary.\u00a0\u00a0 If you give them the details and “apply” for the position, it’s almost certain you will never hear anything again.<\/p>\n
That’s probably because the position doesn’t exist.\u00a0 These companies do a lot of market research masquerading as recruitment, harvesting CVs against which they can put a rate to help their clients – the oil and gas companies and service providers – gain knowledge of the labour market.\u00a0 The request that you submit an expected rate accompanies almost every email, and is asked at every preliminary interview without fail.\u00a0 If you respond with “Well, what are they offering?”<\/em> you will never, ever get a straight answer.\u00a0\u00a0 You’ll get some guff about how they don’t have all the details yet, but they need to know what rate you want just in case your expectations are “miles out”.\u00a0 Even used car salesmen don’t ask people to say how much they’re willing to spend on a car they’ve not even seen.<\/p>\n
I get the impression these companies are forever trying to solve the chicken-and-egg conundrum.\u00a0 They need lots of CVs on their books in order to get contracts with their clients, but they need jobs from their clients to get the CVs in.\u00a0 One way to get lots of CVs in would be to invent a load of jobs and encourage people to apply for them, and then go to a potential client with a barrowful of CVs to show how great they are at attracting talent (and nailing down market rates).\u00a0 I don’t know if this actually happens, but I suspect it does.\u00a0 I’d be willing to bet that over half the jobs posted on the websites of oil and gas recruitment agencies are not actual jobs in the way you or I would understand it.\u00a0 An engineering company bidding for work on a project would need to submit CVs and calculate labour rates, and what better way to do it than advertise the positions, submit the CVs that come in, and use the day-rates provided?\u00a0 And if the company doesn’t win the work, then never mind.\u00a0 The only people whose time has been wasted are a few dozen professional engineers and an agency lackey or two.\u00a0 You might also get an oil company vaguely thinking about maybe doing a project at some point in the future, a skeleton team is put together which includes an engineering manager who has nothing to do but think about how he will staff his organisation in the unlikely event that the project clears the two years of financial wrangling and approvals, and before you know it a load of jobs appear on an agency website.\u00a0 The reason the agent can’t give you a proper job description is because he hasn’t been given one by his client, and the reason his client never gave him one is because he hasn’t the foggiest idea how to write it, let alone get terms and conditions such as salary, accommodation, and rotations specified.\u00a0 Then you’ve got the engineering companies who are hopeless at retaining people and daren’t stop advertising for positions in case they lose yet another engineer and they don’t immediately have a candidate to replace him.\u00a0 Never mind if somebody applies for a job and the position is not yet vacant, he can just hang on until we need him.<\/p>\n
I’m not saying that Orion are exactly like this, if anything they are one of the better agencies out there.\u00a0 But what I talk about above almost certainly happens with all of them to one extent or another, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that they might take a bit more care to establish a relationship with their clients such that they are not posting adverts for non-existent jobs and wasting everyone’s time.\u00a0 But this would fundamentally misunderstand the role the agencies play in all of this.\u00a0 The agencies do not merely charge a finder’s fee for anyone they recruit, they actually serve as the employer who then seconds the employee into the client organisation, for a percentage fee of the salary.\u00a0 The one and only goal of the agencies is to get as many employees seconded into a client organisation as possible whilst expending minimum effort.\u00a0 Given that it takes almost no effort to forward an email from a client regarding some vague job somewhere to a couple of hundred people on a mailing list along with boilerplate body text about submitting their expected rate, and should they be successful in seconding somebody for this position they would stand to make several thousand dollars, you can understand why the agencies have little interest in ensuring the jobs they advertise are real.<\/p>\n
And unfortunately this attitude doesn’t end at the recruitment, it continues all the way through the employment.\u00a0 It takes almost no effort to start up an agency, I reckon you’d need a desk, a computer, a phone, and an ability to bullshit for a few months.\u00a0 Stuff like preparing contracts, arranging visas, etc. you can work out later.\u00a0 And you don’t need to know anything about the jobs being advertised because, let’s\u00a0 face it, the HR manager in the client company didn’t have a clue when he or she sent the thing and chances are the engineering manager doesn’t really know either. Having worked through an agency for a company which failed to give job descriptions for people who had been working there for 6 months and had little idea what to expect of them, I speak from experience.\u00a0 Anyway, quality control amongst recruitment agencies is not as high as it perhaps could be (putting it politely).\u00a0 And once an agency has got its foot in the door with a client, there is no way they are going to upset the apple cart by asking silly questions from potential recruits, and once its got a contract in place and is seconding people in there is even less way they are going to be asking even sillier questions on behalf of their employees.\u00a0 I have had somebody in one of the agencies admit to me that they are terrified their client will move to another agent who will charge a smaller percentage fee, so they are careful not to make any waves.<\/p>\n
What this means in practice is the employee gets the run around.\u00a0 For example, an employee will arrive in-country on a deal which supposedly includes full medical cover.\u00a0 When he gets there he finds he is only covered for emergencies, but as he is there 70% of the year he is not too happy that for all non-emergency treatment or consultations – which he gets for free back home on the NHS – he now has to pay for himself, and it is far from cheap.\u00a0 So he speaks with his agent and asks why his medical cover is less than expected, and the agent will whine that “this is the deal we’ve signed up to” as if that’s actually an explanation instead of merely an alternative to a gormless silence.\u00a0 When the employee will ask that he gets given proper medical cover as promised, the agent will whine that “we can only recover the costs that the client will agree to”.\u00a0 So the employee speaks directly to the client, who says it is nothing to do with them and they must speak to the agent.\u00a0 And the agent will not take the matter up with the client because they will not do anything which might jeopardise the money that is rolling in.\u00a0 So an employee is not properly covered for medical expenses?\u00a0 Who cares?\u00a0 Not the client, and not the agency.\u00a0 Expand this across such issues as pay for travelling time, per diems, laundry bills, visa runs, airport transfers, etc. and you end up with a lot of aggravation.<\/p>\n
To be fair, this isn’t always the case.\u00a0 If the contract between the agency and client has been set up properly and nobody is trying to skim off a margin here and there, the system can work quite smoothly (it all depends on being honest up front: contractors will put up with anything provided they are told well in advance).\u00a0 But far too often the client company decides to outsource all its employment responsibilities to an agency who has no power – or rather, no inclination – to solve the typical personnel issues an employee might have.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 The good engineers get annoyed and move somewhere else and the client companies end up employing the wrong sort of people, leading to grumbles about not being able to find the right people.\u00a0 The agencies make a little money and the companies save a little money, all to the detriment of the industry as a whole.<\/p>\n
All of this brings me to my point, which regards the email I received today from Orion.\u00a0 Agencies seem to take no interest whatsoever in the nature of their client, and demand nothing from them by way of honesty, clarity, or anything else which would normally underpin the relationship between employer and employee.\u00a0 So I’m hardly surprised to see that an agency has found itself contracted to a client which hasn’t bothered to pay its bills.\u00a0 Perhaps if agencies weren’t so keen to jump into bed with anyone and slavishly entertain their every whim, you’d find this sort of thing wouldn’t happen (and I’m sure this is not the only case like it).<\/p>\n
This is not to say that the agency system is broken beyond repair, it is not.\u00a0 Indeed, the agency system is vital to the industry, not least in keeping an awful lot of good engineers employed.\u00a0 And not all agencies are rubbish, and not all client companies are bad.\u00a0 But there are certain client companies which discharge their responsibilities in return for no questions being asked and an easier life, and some agencies appear to be all too happy to oblige, usually at the expense of the employee.\u00a0 This does nobody any favours in the long run, especially in an industry which is forever complaining of a shortage of good people and the difficulties of recruiting them.\u00a0 What is needed is for the major agencies to step up and be a lot more discerning about the jobs they advertise and the companies they do business with, and to be open and honest with their employees and represent them on issues of genuine grievance.\u00a0 But more importantly, the client companies should ensure that they work with the agencies openly and honestly and do not use them as a mere vehicle for screwing down rates, dodging personnel issues, and hoodwinking engineers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve received an interesting email from Orion Group, one of the largest manpower supply agencies in the oil and gas business. Dear Engineer Important information regarding ‘QED International (Oil and Gas) Nigeria Ltd’ “Before you accept any potential assignments with … Continue reading