Editor's Letter

This month I’d like to draw our readers attention to an interview we’re carrying on recruitment with the head of ANCOR Energy Services, a division of Russia’s largest and oldest recruitment company.

I admit I had to laugh when I edited Anna Arutiunova’s article (found on page 46.) The two Moscow State University psychology professors who started the company in 1990 got their start as entrepreneurs with the help of McDonald’s who trained them in western-style HR and recruitment so they could hire staff to run the first Moscow McDonald’s restaurant at Pushkin Square.

I laughed because it was about the same time that I, then a staff writer at The Chicago Tribune, was assigned by my editor to interview manager trainees from Russia who were attending McDonald’s “Hamburger University” in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Illinois. (No lie, “Hamburger University” was the official name!)

The story ended up on Page 1 of the Chicago Tribune and I still have the clip. The lead was something about “Lenin spinning in his grave”. Those were the waning days of Perestroika, the last days of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the “Expat Invasion” of the “New Russia.” Now, 15 years later, I find myself in Moscow, editing an article about the two professors who sent those first McDonald’s Russian managers to Oak Brook to learn the art of flipping burgers and French frying.

Thank Goodness Times Have Changed

The world is small. And trite as it may sound, the world has also changed. One anecdote I cut from this month’s recruitment story to keep things focused on oil and gas, I’ll retell here because of its poignancy. Around the time that Boris Yeltsin faced down coup plotters in Moscow, ANCOR’s MGU professor founders were in a nearby basement office building a personnel database out of information gleaned from written job applications. A Soviet scientist who was applying for a job but feared that his personal details might end up with the KGB, snatched the paper application from an interviewer’s hands and promptly chewed and swallowed it on the spot.

Any student of Soviet (or even Russian history) can understand the scientist’s anxiety. But fortunately today, Russian technical personnel trained in oil and gas engineering and science – especially those that speak English – are finding themselves in a truly enviable position. Everybody wants to hire them.

The “expat invasion” that was such a happening until the 1998 financial crisis and started to emerge again around 2003, is today in partial retreat. Western companies which understand Russia are cutting costs by replacing expat engineers and other middle managers with Russians having the same qualifications, including English language skills.

Russian Engineers are in Demand World Wide Today

And there’s the whole “repat” movement – the trend for Russians who went to live abroad in the 1990s as immigrants or on extended “training” programs in Europe or the United States to return to Russia because of the highly lucrative job opportunities now available for western trained managers who can cross language and cultural lines. And when it comes to engineering, there isn’t much a Russian engineer can’t learn at home.

That’s why in fact international oil and gas companies as well as service and supply companies are increasingly looking to recruit Russian engineers for positions globally. Take the SPE 2006 Technology Conference and Exhibition to be held in Moscow this October 3-6. One of the highlights of the event will be a “Recruitment Fair” in which the likes of Shell, Schlumberger, Saudi Aramco and other global giants will be looking for new talent.

A degree in petroleum science, especially one from Moscow’s Gubkin Oil&Gas University, is considered prestigious for the sons and daughters of Russia’s oil workers in Siberia. Russia hasn’t quite suffered the problems that have occurred in the west where not enough students these days are going into petroleum engineering because they are finding jobs in law, medicine and on Wall Street or London’s “City” more attractive.

I remember specifically the SPE’s awards dinner in Aberdeen during the 2005 Offshore Europe Exhibition and Conference where this problem was discussed in speeches by prominent executives from global oil and gas companies. In addition to the lure of other jobs, students in the West have also been turned off of entering careers in oil science and engineering because of the bad PR that the oil industry gets from the environmental movement.

All this has worked to the advantage of the Russian oil and gas scientist/engineer. And since today Russia does have more or less a market economy, changes in supply and demand are a proof.

Returning again to anecdotal evidence from ANCOR: in 2000, Russia’s largest oil and gas recruiter for middle management and engineering fulfilled less than 100 requests from oil and gas clients. In 2006, in the first seven months alone, such requests have numbered around 800. And not a single applicant for any of those jobs had to eat his paper application.