All the Difference: How Recruitment Shapes E&C Outsourcing

Getting recruitment right in E&C outsourcing is a big challenge—and you run big risks if it’s done poorly. The biggest risk is actually hiring the wrong person—because failing in an E&C job means potentially wrecking a major project. And that can mean serious reputational damage.  Short-term hires are another problem—where sub-optimal performance might slowly result in staff turnover, and you’re stuck with the serious but hidden costs of re-hiring—including more outsourcing fees. The final risk—often underestimated—is going to all that trouble and not even filling your role. Sometimes this involves a trip out to The Philippines to interview from a shortlist, only to find candidates who are OK on paper, but turn out to be so poorly vetted that you’d rather have nobody in the chair.  But outsourcing has changed—and recruitment is at the heart of it.

At Cybalink, we make recruitment easy.

We’ve built a progressive recruitment practice born from experience in the heavy, 100-per week recruitment environments of big E&C projects. It doesn’t just make finding and nurturing talent easy—our recruitment difference makes all the difference to the savings and talent of E&C outsourcing.Here’s how we do it.

The Philippines has a huge pool of talent—at 27M and growing, Manila alone has a population equal to the whole of Australia. The country boasts an education system purpose-built to develop professionals ready to be deployed internationally—more or less designed to become a hub of E&C talent. With a rich history of travelling and relocating for work—a very common practice within the E&C sector—many of these 27M people have worked in diverse professional backgrounds around the world—in the US, the Middle East, and Europe. But for E&C, that can create a ‘needle-in-a-haystack’ problem without the right local knowledge. The Cybalink team has over a decade navigating the local recruitment landscape—with hands-on experience designing strong recruitment process. We’re bulletproofed against the common downfalls—and we know how to find it and nurture the real E&C talent. 

Great recruitment in a Western E& context is a good starting point—but quality comes from not just applying the latest recruitment insights and practices, but from skillfully adapting them to the local context.

At Cybalink, it’s our big advantage. 

With so many candidates boasting global and international experience, we’ve developed the detailed knowledge of major global projects that home country recruiters and companies just can’t get visibility on. Without that nuance, you’re flying blind—so we apply our full visibility, offering detailed reports to hirers on specific international project experience of every candidate. We’ve also added a layer of interview to reality-check candidates. We select for the highest integrity and only 100% correlation between documented and real-world experience—because we’ve seen too many generalist recruiters bamboozled into shortlisting candidates with exaggerated credentials.   We also run a battery of skills tests. From 3D modelling , to estimating under time pressure, to using bespoke spreadsheets to test engineering knowledge with macros. We use our E&C knowledge to simulate real-world pressures in ways that make any cracks appear—before cracks appear under your project from a bad hire.

Too many outsourcing companies generalise—but a finger in every pie can get the fingers of home companies burnt. Operating in dozens of industries is a great way to dial up billable hours—but the ‘jack of all trades’ approach misses the details that make big E&C projects work. Cybalink’s decades of firsthand experience within the industry means we speak your language fluently. We understand the intricacies of E&C project delivery—and know the inward dimensions of the role, beyond the dot points. We don’t just respond with the right people—in some cases we’re so familiar with project pipelines that we anticipate the talent you’ll need, and start global recruitment drives under our own steam to be sure you have the candidates you need as soon as you make your offshore decision. Without special E&C outsourcing, you risk the ‘yes’ people approach—where junior recruiters working up big corporate ladders promise the world and simply aren’t there when a bad hire knocks the wheel off a major project.  But our hires will actually develop your E&C culture, leveraging their experience from global projects.

Too many outsourcers have been careless—with naive or weak recruiting. With our robust,  specialised E&C recruitment, Cybalink’s changed the narrative, and opened the door to reliable, transformational outsourcing in E&C. Our recruitment makes the big choices easy.