Oil and Gas Community

Welcome to our first news letter.

Our community site is really starting to take off. As we prepare to welcome our 1000^th member I thought I would give some updates on some very exciting recent developments.

As most members know the site is part of www.oilandgaspeople.com our new oil and gas job site, offering recruiters and candidates a brand new recruitment solution. Oil and Gas People will go live during January and we expect to be welcoming thousands more members to our community then.

We have added some cool new features to the community site and there are lots more to come over the coming weeks and months. Our new contact importer enables members to invite there contacts from popular social networking site LinkedIn and from email clients such as Hotmail, Yahoo Gmail and AOL. A lot of members have come to the site through LinkedIn so why not invite your contacts to join you on Oil and Gas Community. The bigger the network grows the more we will all benefit. If you are not already a member then join our LinkedIn group also.

This week we have added a feature called Twitter Connect. Any site member can link their profile on the site to their Twitter account and have there status updates on the site sent automatically to Twitter. New members can also join the site using their Twitter login and password. This is also a great way of driving traffic to the site so add your account today it only takes a second. Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with all site developments

Now that the site has plenty of members we have added a new chat room feature. This is in addition to the sites instant messenger and video chat feature. Anyone signed into the site can join the general chat room. It’s just another way to network with people in the industry.

We are in the process of building up a business directory on the site. If you own an oil and gas company or recruitment company, you can have a free listing in the directory by linking to www.oilandgaspeople.com from your website or blog. If this is of interest to you drop us a an email to info@oilandgaspeople.com

As the community site develops we intend to add lots of information pages for new starts and graduates to the industry. Soon we hope to introduce a document library where members can upload and download documents such as safety alerts, lessons learned, procedures, presentations etc. We hope this will become a really useful resource and enable the free sharing of information across the industry.

Finally and this is our most exciting announcement. From Monday this week, all candidates registered on www.oilandgaspeople.com our jobs site, will be able to use their profile on the site as a free online CV. You will be able to link to your edited profile from social networking sites, blogs, email signatures etc. Your edited profile contains no contact details or personal information. It will be fully optimised to appear in search engine results and it will maximise your exposure on the web.

A special link will be available that you can use when applying for jobs on other sites that will give recruiters free access to your full profile including contact details and documents. This is a first for any Jobs site and we expect it to be a very popular feature. The feature will be available to all candidates on www.oilandgaspeople.com whose profile is more than 60% complete.

Now is a good time to log in and complete your profile on the site. Remember recruiters don’t see your CV until the final stages. The more information in your profile, the more chance we will have of accurately matching jobs to you and the more information, the more keywords you will be found for in search engine results.

We hope you enjoy our new features. We thank you for being an early adopter of our sites and we look forward to matching jobs and networking with you in 2010.

Best Wishes for the New Year

Kevin Forbes
www.oilandgaspeople.com
www.oilandgascommunity.com

Marske’s Recruitment Business Manager for the UK, Lee Grimes said, ‘’We are delighted to be working with Oil and Gas People and to be included among the first recruitment companies to be using this fantastic new website. At Marske we are continually developing and looking for new solutions to enable us to offer our clients and candidates the best possible service. We believe that Oil and Gas Peoples’ new model will offer us not only a more efficient service, but also huge cost savings over current recruitment and job sites.’’

Managing Director of Oil and Gas People, Kevin Forbes responded, ‘’As a contractor who has worked for the last 6 years within the Oil Industry, I became frustrated at existing recruitment sites. They offer candidates very little in the way of service and only add to a recruiters work load, in that they have to spend a lot of time sorting through irrelevant CV’s, often received in response to traditional job ads.’’

Kevin went on to say, ‘’It’s sometimes hard to implement change and to introduce something new. Recruiters are used to the current offering of job sites to the point where they accept their flaws and the extra work they create. We are delighted that Marske can see our vision and that they are prepared to support the site from the offset.’’

www.oilandgaspeople.com aims to offer a more efficient service by allowing recruiters to post jobs for free on the site. Jobs posted will be automatically matched to suitable and available candidates and both sides will be required to confirm their interest in each other, before any candidates contact details are released. It’s a process that is totally free and allows recruiters the best possible chance of placing a candidate before they make a small payment to release matched candidates details.

Candidate’s profiles on the site are very detailed and only candidates who are actually available and actively looking for work will be shown. Candidates can link to their profiles using them as a free online CV and as a place where they can store all of their employment documents.

By removing the processing of hundreds of irrelevant CVs from a recruiter’s workload, Kevin Forbes hopes that candidate plus in essence, recruiters, shall once again be offered a more personal, direct and less time consuming service.  The old complaint regarding recruiters never getting back to candidates shall be placed in the past, along with the old-fashioned traditional job board models.

Each candidate selected for a position will receive regular updates through the site and they can be safe in the knowledge that they have full control over their personal details and will no longer be bothered with cold calls about irrelevant jobs.

More details about Marske Site Services can be viewed on their website www.marske.com and more details on why Oil and Gas People is better for recruiters and candidates can be found here http://www.oilandgaspeople.com/about.asp

With the present decline in the gas and oil industry along with the recent trend for pay offs and pay cuts, a vast majority of individuals are looking for better prospects. The down turn has resulted in fewer jobs but more people looking for work. It’s a difficult situation for recruiters, now more than ever they are being inundated with CV’s from potential candidates. Recruiters work loads are increasing at a time when they themselves are trying to cut costs. It is difficult for recruiters to cut costs as there is lots of administration work associated with registering new candidates and from reading through masses of CV’s received for the few vacancies that they have.

The oil and gas market is already showing signs of recovery fueled by the rising oil price and the announcement of new discoveries and prospects, in countries where the doors have traditionally been closed to foreign oil companies. Recruiters don’t want to be turning candidates away when they could have hundreds of vacancies to fill in a few months time.

So how do recruiters cut costs? Traditionally most recruitment companies rely on job boards to find candidates. The current model these sites follow sees a job being posted and candidates asked to send their CV in response. With so many people desperately looking for work these sites make it easy for anyone to send their CV. More often than not most of the CV’s received are irrelevant with the individual not even meeting the basic requirements for the position! It creates lots of unnecessary work for recruiters as each application has to be reviewed manually and logged in their system. The irony is that these recruitment sites charge vast amounts of money for job posts and access to their candidate database. They do very little to assist with the reduction in a recruiters workload and can add to fruitless time wasting and frustration on the recruiters part.

Recruiters now more than ever are turning to their own databases to find candidates. This however presents another problem, keeping an in house database up to date is near impossible! How do recruiters know which candidates are actually looking for work?? Lots of time is spent cold calling potential candidates and sending emails. It’s a lengthy process that not only takes time but costs a great deal of money, employees time has to be budgeted for, plus international calls soon amount to huge phone bills. End case scenario is that you will end up paying to place the position on a job site anyway, as a  result of your own candidate database failing to produce the match required for the vacancy.  This in effect doubles the cost and could see you loosing the position as most companies now use more than one recruitment company. Speed in finding candidates is essential.

So what’s the solution? How about a site where recruiters can post oil and gas jobs for free? A site where suitable candidates can be automatically matched to positions and recruiters can view their matches for free? A site that offers a better solution and solves all of the above problems while offering a better service to candidates…

Enter into the market oilandgaspeople.com A site that has been developed by people in the oil and gas industry and has been designed to solve all of the above problems. Offering cost savings of up to 75% over traditional job sites and a process that makes finding suitable candidates painless and instant. All of the traditional admin work is done away with. Recruiters can post positions for free and then have that position instantly matched to suitable candidates. Candidates detailed profiles can be viewed for free and both sides confirm an interest in each other before an individuals contact details are released. No more cold calling candidates, waiting for reply’s to job ads and sorting through hundreds of CV’s. Just instant matches to suitable and available candidates!

oilandgaspeople.com offers recruiters the best possible chance of placing a candidate before we charge a recruiter. Our match process allows recruiters to search every part of a candidate’s profile. No longer do they have to rely on key word searches. Our candidates are required to update their availability every 60 days to stay live on the site. We will never boast about how many hundreds of thousands of candidates we have registered! Just how many up to date candidate profiles we have, who are actually available and looking for work. Recruiters will be able to download a matched candidates edited CV absolutely free of charge. This CV can even be sent over to their client for approval before a minimal fee of as little as £25 is charged for a candidates contact details.

Our service means candidates are not constantly browsing for jobs. Positions find them... They don’t get send hundreds of irrelevant job alerts and nor do they receive cold calls about positions that don’t interest them. Our candidate profiles can even be linked to and used as a free online CV. Click to view a sample candidates profile. All of a candidates employment documents can be attached to their profile thus saving recruiters even more time once a candidate is accepted.

Through personal experience and essential feedback from over 300 agencies during the past year, we can now offer a more efficient and affordable recruitment service. No other Oil Job site allows recruiters to post positions, match candidates, and access candidates profiles for FREE! We charge a very small fee to release a candidates contact details but only after we have given recruiters the best possible chance of placing that candidate. Our match process is instant and means recruiters can have suitable CV’s on a client’s desk within an hour of receiving the job.

Our model aims to fundamentally change the oil and gas recruitment market. Click here for more information on why we are better for recruiters and candidates.