Lloydminster – Your Recruitment & HR Division Inc. in Lloydminster expects the impact of layoffs in the oil and gas industry due to falling commodity prices to hit home during spring break-up.
“We’re seeing and hearing about numerous layoffs throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan and I think we’ve just kind of started,” said CEO and company owner Kathy Kennedy about the local oilfield labour market.
“I think that will stay happening until – hopefully, September it will stop – but for sure from now until September it’s going to be fairly grim.”
Hard times in oilfield employment have also come to Calgary and Canmore where Your Recruitment has branch offices.
“It’s not just Lloydminster. It’s everywhere,” said Kennedy in late February.
Alberta expects to lose about 31,800 jobs this year as plunging oil prices lead producers to cut costs.
Lloydminster escaped relatively unharmed from the global recession in 2009-10, but Kennedy fears there will be more carnage and job losses in the current downturn.
“This one’s certainly going to be more significant than the 2009-2010 area. This is going to hit home a lot more,” she said.
“This one is much deeper. Oil prices are way lower than they were in 2009, and we dropped so quickly. It started dropping in October, and it was down to under $50 a barrel in two months.
“Nobody saw that big of an impact coming.”
Last June, oil peaked at over $107 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate and companies were scrambling to find new employees.
Kennedy expects it will be awhile before Lloydminster sees another unemployment rate as low as 4.1 per cent as it did in January.
“The employment numbers in January didn’t have the impact of the layoffs yet. You’ll start seeing that in February, but the real tell will be March,” she said.
“It’s hitting every level and every kind of job title right now, so we’re seeing it from labourers to engineers to admin to accounting – everyone is being impacted.”
“We’ll be back to the – you know – we’ll get 15 responses to an ad which we haven’t seen for eight years.”
Kennedy said the job matching business of Your Recruitment has gone from “crazy busy” in the last couple of years to being dead now.
“It just came to a screeching halt and that’s okay,” she said.
“We knew that happens during the cycle, so we’re just trying to redo all our processes and look at everything we do and make sure we are still doing the best.
“It’s definitely slow and we’re looking at our costs and trying to make sure we can stay alive.
Fortunately Kennedy has not had to lay off any of her four employees in Lloydminster, but job postings on the company website have dried up.“Right now, everybody’s just kind of looking at their organization deciding if they can kind of re-jig everybody’s role and not recruit,” she said.
“I have not seen a lot of ads going up.”
Your Recruitment accepts resumes, meets with job seekers to assess their skills and connects them with potential employers.
They also provide a diverse range of recruiting services like resume writing and direct hiring for employers that don’t have a human resources specialist.
“I think we do add a valuable service to the area. I think we are cost effective,” said Kennedy.
“People are going to realize that, even now, when they’ve had to let go of their HR person, they still need that resource on a ‘use as you need’ kind of basis.
“That will hold us over.”
Your Recruitment employees are fielding a lot of questions lately from employers faced with having to lay off workers to cut costs.
“It’s a hard process for them to do. A lot of them are tightly tied to their employees and rightly so,” said Kennedy.
“They are having a tough time coming to terms to do layoffs. It’s not an easy thing for anybody.”
She said clients have been asking about their options, how to handle downsizing and what the market is saying about severance packages.
Employers also want to know what they need to be doing and make sure they are following legislation and all the workplace standards.
“We are very tied to our clients, and so we’re going to help wherever we can, and they know that,” said Kennedy.
Your Recruitment has held several free seminars to jobseekers that could generate future business for them as well as good public relations.
“We did very well for a number of years, so it is our turn to give back,” said Kennedy.
“We had a free session on how to do a good resumé. We did it at Second Cup and there were a few people that attended.
“It was maybe a little bit too soon, so maybe we’ll do another one, but we’ve certainly had people coming in and wanting us to create a resumé for them.”
Your Recruitment also presented a seminar on how to survive the first month of unemployment.
“It’s a real transition and we need to give back to the community,” repeated Kennedy who has plenty of free advice for those who have lost their jobs.
“You need to just kind of sit down and regroup. It’s a grieving process and it’s not easy, so you look at you costs,” she said.
“Make sure that you can handle a couple of months because it may be a couple of months before you find something.
“Get into a routine. Looking for a job is a full-time job.”
Kennedy said jobseekers need to start networking and lower their salary expectations as everyone moves to reduce their costs.
“Networking is really important when you are unemployed. It’s good to get out because you may just run into somebody that’s going to help you find a position,” she added.
For those with jobs, Kennedy said they need to be working their butts off and show that they are flexible and look at things that are going to save money.
“Look at processes and try to save the company money. Those are very important aspects right now,” she said.
Asked what Your Recruitment could do for an unemployed oilfield truck driver, for example, Kennedy said, “We can start networking and ask our clients if they are looking for truck drivers.
“If we know we don’t have any truck drivers, we are very upfront and say ‘we are not going to be able to help you, but here are some organizations that might be looking.’
“Even though we are not going to make any money off that, we are still in the help mode.
“Certainly flexibility is going to be a big thing and lowering their salary expectations,” she advised all jobseekers.
