With 2025 well underway, Rigzone asked oil and gas recruitment experts what the biggest oil and gas hiring surprises they’ve seen so far this year are.
Responding to Rigzone, Dave Mount, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Louisiana-based OneSource Professional Search (OPS), said what’s surprised OPS the most is “the unexpected uncertainty caused by the tariff/trade war by the new U.S. administration”.
“It has, hopefully temporarily, depressed oil prices causing doubt in investment in projects,” he added.
“This uncertainty, plus increased production quotas by OPEC, along with several major oil companies planning reductions in staff by 20-25 percent, has put an excess supply of talented people on the market from layoffs or early retirements,” he continued.
Mount went on to tell Rigzone that OPS remains bullish on hiring for the longer term as the Boomer generation retires and the industry gets back to steady growth.
“But for the immediate term, hiring has slowed for experienced personnel in the United States,” he warned.
“The best surprise we could see is some settlement of the trade/tariff war upheaval and a more coherent/steady leadership from the U.S. government allowing confidence for investors to fund oil and gas projects and operations,” he added.
Offering his view, Clark Conine, President and Recruiting Consultant at Texas based Energy Search Associates, told Rigzone that he’s not too surprised by any hiring dynamics so far this year.
“I expect hiring to pick up as six or seven years of consolidation slows and private capital goes back to work locating new formations outside the core of the major basins,” he said.
“As new teams acquire assets and need to build new operating teams as a result, inventory of ‘underemployed’ professionals will start to come off the market and supply/demand should tighten,” he added.
“The new formations that private capital will need to pursue in order to find future drilling inventory should cause new geological challenges as well, creating the need to hire additional professionals to help put the pieces together on how to develop them,” he noted.
“Obviously the growing demand for power to keep up with new technologies of all kinds is an additional dynamic that should contribute significantly to future hiring needs,” Conine continued.
“It appears that the interest in hiring that I expected is starting to show up in oil and gas related postings,” he went on to state.
Conine told Rigzone that the surprise in the mix is the size of tariffs that the Trump administration has put on other countries and the effect on commodity prices and other markets.
“That will probably cause some teams who otherwise want to start hiring to wait,” he warned.
“When tariffs finally come down and volatility levels recede from markets, I think the industry could be surprised by how much hiring picks up over the next couple of years,” he added.
Brian Binke, the President and CEO of Michigan based the Birmingham Group, an affiliate of Sanford Rose Associates, told Rigzone that the biggest oil and gas hiring surprise he’s seen so far in 2025 is that “the speed of hiring rebounded in midstream construction”.
“We expected an uptick after the election, but not the volume …[of] new work, especially in transmission and RNG,” he added.
“We’ve seen a spike in demand for PMs, estimators, and leaders with real field experience,” he continued.
Binke also outlined to Rigzone that he thinks the rest of the year will spring up more oil and gas hiring surprises.
“If tariffs hold, domestic manufacturing will ramp fast, and that means more construction, more hiring demands between gas and renewables,” Binke said.
“It’s shaping up to be one of the busiest years we see in a while,” he added.
Rigzone has contacted the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the White House for comment on Mount, Conine, and Binke’s statements. Rigzone has also contacted OPEC for comment on Mount’s statement. At the time of writing, none of the above have responded to Rigzone.
Source: By Andreas Exarheas from Rigzone.com