All-Round Opportunity in Talent and HR Solutions

Kelly Services sees the recently approved Labor Reform as a major breakthrough for the country. Maria Griselda Hernández, Director General of Kelly Services Mexico, has a clear perspective of the future advantages that the Labor and Energy Reforms will bring. “Companies are looking to comply with the Labor Reform. Consequently, they will interact with suppliers that have the right strategies to attract, develop, retain and promote their talent. Kelly Services believes that providing talent and HR solutions to the Mexican oil and gas industry will represent an all-round opportunity, by generating employment, economic growth, and better opportunities for all parties involved in the supply chain,” declares Hernández. One example of the benefits that the Labor Reform has brought is the scheme known as Employee Participation in Profit Sharing Payments (PTUs). “PTUs represents the best way for companies to share their profits with their workforce,” says Hernández. “Companies that comply with it are very successful, since they are providing the necessary corporate transparency. In return, this will continue attracting the best talent while improving human capital ratios and reducing costs through learning curves.”

The emergence of new Mexican centers of industry such as the Bajio region have created new HR challenges as investment and infrastructure spring up. While the Bajio’s new found trendiness is primarily down to the automotive and aerospace sectors, the oil and gas industry is also looking to engage there. “The growth experienced in this region has been exponential, to the point where job offers are starting to increase much faster than staff availability. Companies will need to start outsourcing and acquire talent with the necessary expertise, competencies, abilities, and leadership from other states. If Mexico cannot meet its human resource demands, it will have to turn to foreign expertise,” Hernández explains. This neatly outlines one of the main challenges Kelly Services is facing: finding the specialized human capital that companies are in desperate need for, wherever it may be. Exploration, production, construction, and drilling are all areas that are expecting a boom in demand and the scarcity of supply provides a large room for opportunity for the firm’s recruitment services. Attracting professionals is another obstacle since mobility is required for many of these technical positions, an aspect that many Mexican professionals might balk at. “It will certainly be a difficult task to convince people to make the decision to move towards the opportunities to ensure their professional development and their economic well-being,” Hernández points out.

In order to tackle these challenges, Kelly Services Mexico has come up with a hiring strategy named Flexible Human Capital. “Companies cannot simply hire staff during boom times and retain them until the next peak comes in, they need to have a flexible approach to find the necessary human resources willing to work only during peak periods,” Hernández explains. By allowing this, Kelly Services delivers a value adding service which hand-picks the temporary talent needed in a given company. After this, the firm can redistribute such staff throughout other companies as needed. This system generates flexible employees with unlimited mobility that are participating in multiple projects, at different locations, and which will experience constant demand for their skills from various companies. Besides this strategy, Kelly Services is aware that people moving from project to project may see a variety of certification demands being put forward by different companies. In response, it has developed a web-based platform, the Kelly Learning Center, which allows the firm to provide its talent with all the certifications they need to fill specific positions. Through this online support, the firm can also remotely track the progress of the personnel being trained and the status of its certification programs. “This is a very helpful tool, especially in the oil and gas industry. Since most of the projects are undertaken in remote locations, we cannot schedule faceto-face training sessions. This program allows us to develop our talent through web-based training sessions, wherever they may be, and certify them in any of the different areas where our clients may be,” says Hernández.

Based on its experience across Latin America, Kelly Services sees its presence in Mexico as an example, since it says it is the go-to firm to find the best talent for the oil and gas industry. One of the key differences Kelly Services has with other HR firms, and one on which it bases its success, is that it does not use a generic staffing model but rather develops “business process outsourcing solutions. Under this model, our firm is able to take customers’ processes and complement them with our knowledge and experience so that it can successfully execute and manage them. In addition, we are able to provide the necessary Key Performance Indicators for expected production, including all support operations: staffing, payroll, accounts receivable, and accounts payable operations,” Hernández discloses. “This business process model has not yet been replicated by any of our international competitors, allowing Kelly Services to reap the fruits of its oil and gas success.”