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Everyone
agreed that new recruits needed a realistic
view of life in the field.
As the worldwide
leader in the oilfield services sector,
Schlumberger doesn't have a problem finding
recruits. To ensure the company hires the
best and the brightest, the recruiting department
of Schlumberger Oilfield Services invests
a substantial amount of time and effort
into interviewing and evaluating the men
and women who apply to work for the company
as field engineers.
 In
North America, Schlumberger (pronounced
Shlum-ber-shay) visits 40 to 60 eminent
universities each year in its quest for
talented engineers, computer scientists,
and geoscientists. Job candidates who pass
the first round of interviews are flown
to Schlumberger's Houston offices for a
second round of face-to-face interviews.
Those who
are hired as field engineers embark upon
an intensive training period, both in training
centers and in the field. Perhaps their
first view of the field is a rig in the
Gulf of Mexico, or aboard a seismic ship
in the blustery North Sea, or on a frozen
patch of land in faraway Alberta, Canada.
First-rung
Schlumberger engineers, who tend to work
in the field for their initial training
period from three to five years, work on
demanding schedules to fit a client's needs
and lead a life that is far from ordinary.
The recruits face challenges in the field
that require them to not only leverage superior
technology to achieve the client's goals,
but also to apply project management and
people skills learned through their ongoing
training with Schlumberger.
 Because
they travel so much, work peculiar hours,
and organize their personal lives differently
than most, field engineers live what can
definitely be termed a dynamic lifestyle.
In the past,
the Schlumberger Oilfield Services recruiting
office had sent second-round interview candidates
to actual job sites to give serious interviewees
a chance to see what the work entails and
the conditions under which the work takes
place.
"Because
taking candidates to the rig can be such
a costly exercise in terms of time and money,
coupled with increasingly stringent Quality,
Health, Safety & Environment standards,
we entertained the idea of bringing the
rig to them," says recruiter Sarah
Cruddas.
"Although
our attrition rates are well below the oilfield
services industry average, some candidates
that we consider hiring can still be surprised
by the lifestyle changes they will have
to face. Interestingly, 30 percent of the
Schlumberger field workforce is made up
of women and the rate of attrition for this
group is minimal."
For Cruddas,
the solution became obvious: "We needed
to show the reality of being a field engineer
to our job candidates. We couldn't always
bring our candidates to the oil rig, so
we decided to bring the oil rig to them."
 After
teaming up with director and writer John
Girard and Invision Media Communications,
a full-service film, video, and animation
company in East Orange, NJ, Schlumberger
decided that it needed a realistic documentary
for its field engineering candidates. And
being leading-edge technology companies,
Schlumberger and Invision also decided the
30-minute documentary, titled Life in the
Field, would be mostly filmed with digital
high-definition cameras, pumped up with
Dolby Surround Sound", and stored not
on the industry-standard VHS format but
on DVD.
"We
decided to take our recruiting video to
the next level in high-definition DVD to
really capture Life in the Field,"
says Cruddas.
To make Life
in the Field, Invision Media Communications
knew it was facing a rugged and demanding
test not only of themselves but also of
their field equipment. The travel itinerary
that Schlumberger presented to the Invision
film crew had them traveling almost nonstop
to some of the world's remote areas. By
necessity, their equipment had to be durable
and reliable. When you're at an oil well
in a remote desert section of Texas or aboard
a seismic vessel more than two hours helicopter
flight off the Gulf of Mexico, equipment
failure is not an option. Understandably,
when the Invision Media Communications staff
put together its list of camera equipment,
it chose Sony hardware.
THE SCHLUMBERGER
PROFILE
Founded in 1927 by Conrad (a physicist)
and Marcel (an engineer) Schlumberger, the
company revolutionized the oil industry
with an electrical wireline logging technique.
Today, Schlumberger Limited is a global
technology services company, with 75,000
employees, representing 140 nationalities,
and working in more than 100 countries.
A publicly traded company, Schlumberger
is comprised of two business segments: Schlumberger
Oilfield Services and SchlumbergerSema.
Schlumberger
Oilfield Services is the largest oilfield
services company in the world. It  supplies
products, technical solutions, and services
to the oil and gas exploration and production
industry. A technology heavyweight, SchlumbergerSema
supplies IT consulting, systems integration,
managed services, and other products to
the oil and gas, telecommunications, energy
and utilities, finance, transport, and public-sector
markets.
When it comes
to field engineers, Schlumberger knows exactly
who it needs. "The ideal candidate
is looking for more than a job; they want
a career," states a company recruiting
brochure. "They are resilient, ready
to take the initiative and the responsibility
that goes with it. They enjoy challenges
and dealing directly with people. This is
what we see as the 'Schlumberger profile.'
"
With its
recruiting documentary, "Schlumberger
wanted it to be a realistic depiction of
the field-it had to show the positives and
negatives of the lifestyle," says Cruddas.
Schlumberger
looks for people who bring passion to both
work and play. While field engineers do
work extended hours and on a schedule basis,
many pluses exist. Between schedules, these
engineers may be seen volcano climbing in
Chile or kayaking down a Canadian river.
Or, as the film points out, an engineer
working on a vessel in the Gulf of Mexico
for a long period of time will fly to his
home in Norway for an extended uninterrupted
visit with his family. There's plenty of
variety in the work schedule, depending
on the job and location.
"The
work is challenging but it is also hugely
rewarding," says Cruddas. "Believe
me, we wouldn't get any candidates if it
wasn't!
"People
are our biggest asset. We look upon the
more than 75,000 employees working for Schlumberger
all over the world as a substantial investment,
in them and in their career goals,"
says Cruddas. "We want recruits we've
chosen to
remain with the company throughout their
careers. That's why we offer "borderless
careers," where employees are given
the chance to not only participate in future
career choices, but actively work toward
those goals for themselves."
LIFE IN
THE FIELD
For the Invision crew, the making of the
Life in the Field documentary was similarly
challenging. Invision assembled a five-person
crew that was comprised of director and
writer John Girard, who had previously worked
with Schlumberger both independently and
with Invision; David Seiz, director of photography;
camera operators John McMahon and Ian Woolstan-Smith;
and Nikko Mazet, audio
engineer. At key points in the production,
Invision executive producer Cynthia
Urbaez-Phillips accompanied the crew. To
facilitate matters, Schlumberger's Cruddas,
in the capacity of project manager, and
field advisor Enrique Villarroel accompanied
the Invision film crew.
Traveling
with 34 cases of audio and video equipment,
the Invision crew visited six Schlumberger
work sites in just 36 days. The initial
itinerary included Abu Dhabi, Canada, Indonesia,
Nigeria, Scotland, and Venezuela, in addition
to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.
"I can't
believe we did it," says Urbaez-Phillips.
"Transporting this valuable equipment
from one location and country to another,
on schedule, was no easy undertaking."
 Like
the field engineers whose work lives it
was filming, the Invision crew toiled under
demanding conditions, sometimes working
nonstop for four days at a time. "We
had a bare bones crew," says Girard.
"The video has no talking heads. We'd
travel to the work environment, absorb what
was happening, ID the people who would be
players, mic them, and let them go."
To capture
the reality of the oilfield lifestyle, the
Invision team shot mostly in 1080i HD with
a pair of Sony HDW-700A cameras. It also
used a Sony DVCAM camcorder and the DXC-LS1
quarter-inch CCD sub-miniature camera. Footage
was viewed on four Sony monitors: two BVM-D9H5U
AC/DC nine-inch (viewable area, measured
diagonally) models and two PVM-8045Q HR
4:3/16:9 eight-inch (viewable area, measured
diagonally) models. For recording and editing,
Girard and company relied upon a pair of
Sony DSR-50 DVCAM recording decks and a
Sony HDCAM HDW-500 editing deck.
"The
gear was excellent," says Girard. "We
shot in extreme environments and the equipment
held up remarkably. I've worked with conventional
equipment in conventional settings and had
the equipment fail. We were working in extreme
environments--in deserts and offshore on
oil rigs. With our compressed schedule,
the last thing I needed was equipment failure.
It never happened once with the Sony equipment."
Director
of photography David Seiz was similarly
impressed with the Sony equipments"
reliability. "The cameras had to work
twenty hours straight in torturous conditions
after being manhandled by less-than-sensitive
airport personnel," he says. "They
never failed. They always performed like
it was day one.
THE FINAL
RESULT
Once everyone had returned to the U.S.,
Invision edited the more than 30 hours of
high-definition footage and authored it
to DVD. Viewers of Life in the Field contend
that it is as close to being there as possible,
says Cruddas. Schlumberger opted for the
ultimate DVD and plasma screens for viewing
the film with the interview candidates;
another advantage of high-definition DVD
is that the documentary can be played on
laptops anytime, anywhere.
"The
video is already achieving its purpose,"
says Cruddas. "The video has been proven
to help potential field engineer candidates
recognize that they are not suited for this
work and their attention can then be directed
to more suitable employment opportunities
within Schlumberger.
"We're
a pretty demanding company, and we're proud
of that fact," says Cruddas. "We
don't shy away from the work and we don't
mind painting a true-to-life portrait of
what recruits can really expect. The selection
of high-definition technology helped us
achieve the reality check we needed for
our candidates-a true-to-life portrait of
Life in the Field."
It also helps
enforce our corporate message, says Cruddas,
that "Schlumberger is a technology
leader. High definition is not the norm
with corporate videos. By making the video
in high definition, we're demonstrating
that Schlumberger is cutting-edge."
"The
most satisfying moment for me occurred in
a Houston hotel," says Seiz. "We
commandeered a large screen TV in the lobby
bar to check out some of our dailies. Even
though the Houston Astros were in the playoff
hunt, everyone was ignoring the game and
watching our footage, saying things like
"That's incredible." People couldn't
believe how extraordinary our high-definition
assets looked, even in a down converted
format."
Urbaez-Phillips
concurs. "I believe high definition
should be the high-end corporate communications
format," she says. "If you want
to make an impression, shoot it in high
definition."
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