Meet our Oil & Gas specialist, David Dixon

Specialist Recruitment, Real People series.

Name: David Dixon
Title: Client Services Manager
Click here to contact David

We sat down with our Oil & Gas Client Services Manager, David, to discover how his team have helped clients with their specialist recruitment needs.

11 year career gaining in-depth market knowledge

Q1: Tell us about your experience working in Oil & Gas

I have worked within the Oil & Gas industry for the duration of my 11 year career gaining in-depth market knowledge and a deep understanding of my client’s priorities. Oil & Gas is a vibrant, fast paced and highly changeable market, requiring flexibility and a proactive agile approach to adapt to changes. I understand these challenges and have worked with my clients to adapt and produce scalable solutions over the years to meet their needs.

My role within the Oil & Gas team is to develop and strengthen existing client relationships, understanding their priorities and challenges to deliver overall results. My clients often have requirements internationally in the UK, Europe and Africa, so understanding their in-country needs becomes more essential; I particularly love the variety that comes with this.

Experience has taught me the value of communicating clearly with my clients

Q2: How do you ensure excellent service for your clients?

Experience has taught me the value of communicating clearly with my clients to ensure excellence from start to finish. Our team is close knit, positive, driven, striving towards the same goals, so I work closely to ensure our recruiters understand the client’s specific needs for a particular role, tapping into the right candidate talent pool.

I’ll monitor KPIs to hit timescales, monitoring quality throughout, giving our clients consistent communication throughout the process. My clients seem to appreciate that I am focused on the long term client journey building a partnership, rather than any quick pushy short term goals other agencies might have.

Q3: How do you ensure you have the right industry knowledge?

I find the Oil & Gas industry fascinating, which is why I make an effort to get to know not only my clients on a personal level, but also their company culture, how their energy is produced, what systems and processes they use, what new technology there are investing in, and which locations are key to their development, for example. A lot of my industry knowledge is gained from talking to clients, visiting their locations and asking the right questions – seeing a project in action can help put it into context and in turn help you sell it to a candidate. I’ll also share any interesting market intelligence with them so that we can both benefit each other’s knowledge and add value.

Setting up an in-country office in Albania

Q4: What’s been your biggest challenge?

In 2017, First Recruitment Group set up an in-country office in Albania, specifically to support Oil & Gas client, Technip. I held a key responsibility in opening, managing and developing it. We had to understand the client’s needs in-country, legal requirements, compliance, finding out exactly what they wanted us to do. We supported everything from recruitment to immigration and payroll.

We then took the time to go and meet key parties and discuss how we were going to go about the task in hand and how we could work collaboratively in order to produce the best possible results. We sourced a partner, set up an in-country bank account and even spoke with local businesses to ensure candidates had the accommodation they needed when working over there, not forgetting sitting down to understand legislation in Albania. It was a challenge, requiring close care and attention due the fact we essentially set up a business from scratch, but seeing the Albanian office thriving with over 50 contractors has made it all worthwhile.

A fully compliant Singapore recruitment office

Q5: Tell us about a success you have felt most proud about

Setting up the Albania office was certainly one of my proudest moments, and this success lead to further success with the client Technip. As a result of our excellent work, we were offered the chance to supply services in Singapore. Using everything I had learned from opening the office in Albania, our team worked with the local partners to ensure we set up a fully compliant office, dealing with payroll, immigration, onboarding, and of course recruitment. It was exciting to recruit the Singaporean staff for this office and see it successfully open in 2018. We now have more and more live contractors working in Singapore as a result.

A bit of fun

Q6: What did you want to be when you grew up?

Employed.