Spotlight Online for Employment and Recruiting Professionals, April 28, 2010

Up until two years ago, college recruiting was valued by Cameron, but the program was not well-organized. Often, the company’s three business groups would show up at career fairs separately and, at times, compete for the same candidates.   

“We were always looking for good people, but we didn’t have a unified ‘one Cameron’ approach when it came to college recruiting,” says John Watson, director of global talent acquisition for the global oil and gas products and services provider headquartered in Houston.  

The company relied heavily on “poaching” from other companies (a common practice in the industry, Watson says) or on growing its work force as a result of acquisitions.   

“We looked at our situation and saw that the majority of our plant managers came from external sources such as these,” Watson says. “The picture became clear that we needed to do some organic growth.” 

Two years ago—in the midst of the recession—Cameron made a shift to focus hiring efforts on college recruiting. To help facilitate this change, the company expanded the size of some of its student programs. For example, its internship program tripled in size.  

“We didn’t need to make much of a business case to make this paradigm shift,” Watson says. “We identified an aging problem in silos and saw gaps in our work force. We also knew that every time we needed someone to fill an opening, we had to do it from an external source. We didn’t have much ‘bench strength’ and management saw that.” 

This realization coincided with the fruits of the company’s rotational program that was launched in 2000.  

Graduates of the rotational program served as strong examples of the benefits of bringing in college students and growing them through the company.  

While college hiring and onboarding and training hires is costly in terms of budget, the process of experienced hiring is costly in a different way.  

“When you headhunt, you sometimes inherit a candidate’s bad habits and have to acclimate them to a different culture,” Watson explains. “College hires come in with fresh ideas and open sets of eyes. With this in mind, we have them rotate so they can absorb our company and its culture from different perspectives and gain experience and understanding.”   

Cameron benefits from what Watson describes as a culture that supports collaboration from the top down. It’s a critical component because the company has no recruiters on staff; instead, it relies on its local branches for recruiting.  

Perhaps the biggest strides it has made through collaboration have come in partnering with universities for research and development, and more. Cameron has established these partnerships at 42 schools across the globe and these schools have helped the company achieve three of its initiatives: research and development, college recruiting, and advanced education/leadership training.  

According to Watson, Cameron is beginning to leverage its university relationships for continuous leadership development. Two key programs are its executive education opportunities with Harvard University and its senior leadership development program with Rice University.

“We will continue to harvest these relationships to increase the effectiveness and sustainability of our leadership-development model which strives to develop leaders at all levels within Cameron,” he says. “We have developed a lot of good synergies on this front. Our involvement goes much deeper than career fairs and information sessions. Professors on those campuses notice this and promote us to students. It has helped us demonstrate to schools our commitment to them and their students, and helped us make our key paradigm shift to college recruiting.”