Oil Rig Jobs

Oil Rigs Employment

Looking for oil rigs employment? Hunting for a job always feels like a major challenge. But the task facing newbies in the offshore oil and gas industry is especially daunting. Looking for jobs, writing your cover letter and resume, the interview process – so many tasks and so many things to go wrong. However, the truth is that you don’t need to worry. Statistically, unless an industry is dying, you will always be able to get a job. And the oil industry is still alive and kicking. It will remain so for the next few decades, unless the world suddenly manages to stop guzzling oil.

When looking for oil rigs employment, you need to keep one important point in mind. For every five interviews you attend, you should receive at least one job offer. When times are good, you could find yourself attending two interviews on Monday and both oil service contractors will call you back the next day asking you to start immediately.

The simple fact is that companies won’t call you for an interview unless they are seriously looking for people. Conducting an interview is an expensive process. Once an employer calls you for an interview, you are already halfway towards getting hired. If you attend 20 interviews and are rejected for all of them, you may want to look for a psychiatrist or therapist. Unless you lied on your resume and were found out, this kind of rejection shows that you are self-sabotaging your own interviews. You should look for professional help to cure your problem.

What if you aren’t getting any interviews? Is there something wrong with you? Not necessarily. You’ll often see many job vacancies on the popular job boards like Monster. But there are times when half of these advertisements are fake – tricks used by human resource departments to find out how many unemployed workers are available. Many employers want to find out how easily they can replace their current workers with cheaper workers.

What Are Managers Looking For?

If you want to get hired, you need to give the interviewer what he is looking for. Your attitude matters a lot. An offshore oil rig is not a big place – very often, 200 to 300 workers are squeezed into a small space in the middle of the ocean far away from civilization. You have nowhere to run from other people, and other people don’t have anywhere to run away from you. This means that no employer wants to hire a troublemaker. While you want to give the impression of being strong and tough, you don’t want to do this by bragging about how many fights you got into or won.

Just as you don’t want to be known as a troublemaker, you also don’t want to be known as a wimp. The ocean is not a forgiving mistress, and everyone on board the oil rig needs to be able to pull his own weight. When something like a sudden storm occurs, your buddies will be too busy with their own work to cover for you.

So if you are fresh from school and don’t have any relevant working history, you don’t want to tell your interviewer that you were the star dancer of your school’s award-winning ballet troupe – not even if the ballet training gave you the endurance to run a marathon and the strength to bench-press 200 pounds. The simple point is this – if many people think a particular activity is only for wimps or nerds, you don’t want it on your resume and you don’t want to tell your interviewer about it.

Your interviewer wants to hear about manly pursuits like being a quarterback or linebacker, or maybe even a scout or cadet. If you ever mention that you were the Science Club president, Newspaper Club secretary or medal-winning gymnast, you’ll be quickly bundled out of the interview room. While its not fair, perception matters a lot.

So you need to have the right attitude, but you also need to have some relevant skills. You need to ask your interviewer what he wants from you. What skills does he need you to display? In theory, this information will be in the job advertisement. In practice, if you’ve ever played the telephone game as a child, you’ll know that what the HR manager put in the advertisement is a far cry from what the interviewer wants. In any case, by asking this question, and responding with your strengths, you will make it easier for the interviewer to remember you when it’s time to choose which candidate to hire.

Just because you have never worked on an oil rig does not mean you don’t have a chance of getting hired. Do you have any ocean-going experience? Have you ever worked on your uncle’s trawler during your vacation? Have you worked as a laborer on a construction site? If you were applying for a mechanic’s job on an oil rig, did you ever build an engine from scratch for you motorcycle? Did you ever help your older brother repair and build his car’s engine? Depending on what oil rig job you are looking for, any or all of these could be relevant experience that can help you get hired. It’s certainly better than the experience of the laid-off office boy from Lehman Brothers.

If you are serious about getting hired for roustabout jobs and other offshore oil rig jobs, brainstorm your relevant experiences before your interviews. Dress neatly (ask the HR staff who called you what to wear), stay calm during the interview, and remember that most people will get at least one job offer for every five interviews they attend. Think back over every interview you finish – what did you do well, and what did you do wrong? Sit down, figure out your mistakes and do better the next time. Practice makes perfect. Remember, getting hired for oil rig roustabout jobs and offshore drilling jobs is not rocket science.

RigWorker.com has been helping people find oil rigs employment since 1998.

Click here to find out how we can help you get your resume/cv in front of the hiring managers for the best offshore oil rig jobs.

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