Issue 15 winter 08

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Olivier Peyret has recently been appointed vice president of software at oilfield services company Schlumberger. Before that he spent a year as vice president for university collaborations and recruitment at the company, reporting to the chief technology officer on R&D issues, and to the director of human resources on the recruitment side.

Peyret joined Schlumberger in 1981 after obtaining an  MSc in geological engineering from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie de Nancy, France. He has held many technical and managerial positions in operations, marketing and R&D, and has worked in many countries, including Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, UK, Germany, United Arab Emirates, USA, and France.

Peyret was, until recently, the general manager of the Schlumberger R&D Center in Clamart, France – cradle of some of the group’s most successful innovations. Last summer he was appointed vice-president of university collaborations and recruitment, based at the company’s Paris headquarters. His responsibility was to develop the interaction between the Schlumberger group and the academic world as a way to boost innovation.

He is a member of various professional bodies as well as being president and a founder member of “c.genial”, a French foundation for the promotion of science and technology.

Schlumberger recruits around 7000 graduates a year, or 8% of the company’s total staff, for a mix of R&D, analytic and operational roles. This could increase to perhaps 10,000 a year in three to four years’ time, according to Peyret, although this will depend on the financial climate. The company also faces significant staff turnover, in part because of the demanding nature of its operational roles, which are often on rigs, ships or remote exploration sites.

“In our operationally intensive world we do lose a lot of staff,” said Peyret. “After five years we have kept 40% of that year’s recruits. After 10 years we have kept around 20%. So we need to replenish the company very regularly, and try to retain people. Our recruitment costs are significant but small compared to training costs. At two years, we could add another year of costs spent on recruiting and training to the price of employing a graduate. So keeping them is key.”

[For comparison, a 2008 membership survey by the UK’s Association of Graduate Recruiters found 94% retention of graduates after one year, 74% after three years and 57% after five years.]

So how does Schlumberger manage recruitment and retention on such a large scale?

Global outlook

Peyret says the first rule is to hire everywhere in the world.

“We work in more than 80 countries and make a point of hiring from those countries,” he said. “We look at the breakdown of global revenue by region and at the population of the company by nationality and try to ensure they match.”

The trick for Schlumberger is to find the right people wherever they are, so it has developed a highly structured recruiting organisation to do so.

It has an Ambassador program, which defines around 50 elite universities around the world to which Schlumberger wants to be particularly close. The program includes the usual choices, such as MIT, as well as less obvious ones such as universities in Khartoum and Saudi Arabia. The company appoints senior managers, preferably graduates from those universities, to manage the relationship, attending careers fairs, meeting faculty, organising internships and arranging teaching visits.

“But we only hire 25% of our admissions from those universities,” said Peyret. “We have another 150 universities that are ‘target schools’, which may provide different types of personnel for operationally intensive jobs. None of this is happening by magic. It’s happening through a very organised methodBut none of this is happening by magic. It’s happening through a very organised method.”

Schlumberger has a global network of recruiters, usually people who have worked in the roles for which it is hiring, who work with its Ambassador and target universities, as well as other institutions. The key to maintaining good relationships is consistency.

“Being there in good times or bad times has been very important, and we have been recognised for that,” said Peyret. “We may turn up at a university one year and not recruit anybody, but at least we are there to explain why. This pays off when we need lots of people, as we do now.”

Assessing recruits

Schlumberger hires three types of recruits. Around 80% of the admissions is operational people to work on rigs, seismic boats and exploration teams. A further 10% of the intake is R&D people, who will work in an office or lab developing new science and technology and usually have a Masters degree and often a PhD. The last 10% are geo-scientists and engineers who apply the data that the company uncovers.

Most of the recruits have technical skills. Peyret says the company simplifies its recruitment by relying on the quality of degrees from its partner institutions.

“If you know which schools are good and you receive a CV from somebody from that school, it is quite easy to pre-sort applications,” he said. “We don’t need to bother about people’s technical skills, although we do check them. The fact that they came out of those schools is enough for us. Instead we check people’s attitudes, whether people are service-minded, because Schlumberger is a services company, and their resilience to working in challenging environments.

“The recruitment process is about matching culture and attitudes. We want to give the person being recruited the opportunity to assess Schlumberger as much as we want to assess them. So the first interview involves general selection questions and the second takes a couple of days and involves activities where we look at people’s problem-solving abilities, group dynamics and how they cope under stress.

“After a candidate has joined, we keep filtering, and find that quite a few people we have hired are not right for the job. We lose about 25% of graduate recruits within a year.”

The filtering process includes a month spent in an operational environment before graduates start training, so they can assess the life and culture. If they get through that, they go to a training school for three months to understand operational practices.

“This is another three months during which we can check what these people are like. By the end of it, both sides will have a good idea of whether a candidate will stay.”

Evolving the process

Peyret is proud of the company’s international recruitment efforts, but says its approach no longer sets the company apart from the competition.

“Where we are trying to stay ahead is in our academic relationships,” he said, particularly in trying to deepen existing relationships and broaden the company’s international reach.

“If institutions want to remain Ambassador schools for Schlumberger, we now need to have a R&D engagement with them as well,” said Peyret. “We’re trying to improve how we organise that, moving beyond personal relationships between Schlumberger people and individual academics to develop strategic relationships.If we want to maintain a long-term relationship with the community we need to contribute

“We’re also trying to extend the footprint, for example with the University of Khartoum. It would not be immediately obvious to go in that direction, but we have decided to do so.

“There is an expectation from the countries that we work in, and from us as a global citizen, that if we want to maintain a long-term relationship with the community we need to contribute, and not just do business there. In addition, remote R&D labs offer us an insight into local technological problems, and this is very valuable to us.

“So we can help local academia to develop, for example through funding, but even more so by collaboration with our people. This helps local professors have more interesting research projects that attract better students, who may then stay in the country. We’re doing this in the Sudan and plan to expand to Angola, and Algeria, amongst others. They’re all relevant to our business, and places where we believe we can have a profound effect on helping them develop their academic strength.”

Timescales

But the approach takes time.

“It has taken the better part of 30 years to become a true international company in terms of the nationalities of those employed at Schlumberger,” said Peyret. “Our efforts to participate in international R&D may take us as long.”

The company already has more than 30 research and development centres spread across all the continents, apart from Africa. It has also moved its long-term R&D centre from a wooded site in Connecticut, US, on to the MIT campus in Boston.

“We made the move after 50 years in Connecticut and already it’s paying off for us tenfold,” said Peyret. “The last time I visited, I was amazed to see how many MIT faculty were in the Schlumberger cafeteria as a matter of routine. It demonstrates the value to us of proximity, as well as helping people studying at MIT learn about Schlumberger.”

The company has made similar moves to locate research on university premises in Beijing, Moscow, Saudi Arabia and Cambridge, England.

Multi-disciplinarity

Schlumberger needs to apply an increasing number of scientific and technological disciplines to its research and operations. But it can’t master them all, especially those at the interface between two classic disciplines.

“The universities become a fantastic source of other disciplines if we are well connected,” said Peyret. “We’re also seeing more interconnection between disciplines within the academic environment.”

The company is also turning to academia for another form of multi-disciplinarity, looking at how other industries use the technologies it uses.

“What the university ecosystem can bring is that academics use their science in many industries,” he said. For example, Schlumberger needs high-temperature electronics and mechanical systems to work at the bottom of deep bore holes. The automotive industry is also very interested in high-temperature electronics, for in-engine sensing.

“We want to connect to them through the networks created within the universities we work with.”

This has an impact on the type of people the company recruits.

“There are 4000 scientists at Schlumberger R&D facilities,” said Peyret. “Imagine if each of them was connected to one, two, five or even 10 others through public and personal networks. If we can manage that well, we can gain access to a phenomenal amount of brainpower.

“When we hire scientists today we are looking more strongly for people capable of integrating many sciences and the strong networking skills that are becoming more relevant for scientists.

“The ability to connect to the rest of the community is crucial.”

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