Recruiting Team El Paso
Our Recruiting department implements El Paso’s overall hiring strategy in support of our business units. As part of that effort, Recruiting consults with hiring managers and works with internal clients to understand their staffing requirements, identify qualified job applicants, and screen candidates for open positions.
We value the rich pool of knowledge possessed by career professionals, and we reach out to these candidates through professional organizations, targeted advertising, and job fairs. We believe El Paso’s reputation in the industry is an asset in recruitment, based on the more than 18,000 job applications received in 2010 from external candidates. As part of our recruitment efforts for experienced professionals, we use an Employee Referral Program that offers a cash bonus to all employees, excluding managers and officers, who make successful referrals. Every position filled by a referral carries at least a $1,000 bonus, with some positions qualifying for a $10,000 mega bonus.
We filled more than 350 positions in 2010 with external candidates, with nearly 8 percent resulting from employee referrals. This is an increase from 2009 when we filled 103 positions, with almost 6 percent of those positions resulting from employee referrals.
We are also active on college and university campuses where we recruit from programs in engineering, geology, and geophysics. El Paso recruiters made a total of 73 visits to eight college campuses during 2010.
Our summer intern program, EP Elite, extends the possibilities of a career at El Paso to promising college students through hands-on summer internships. In 2010, we placed 60 interns throughout the company. This is a decrease from 2009 when we placed 95 interns.
Pipeline Operations Workforce Planning Team
We continue to develop a strong workforce with the right skills to achieve El Paso’s strategic objectives. Today, the energy industry overall has a high number of skilled employees approaching the traditional retirement age. Across our Pipeline Operations group, we have focused on the challenges of workforce planning and talent development, taking into consideration normal employee attrition and competition for new skilled technicians.
In 2010, the Operations Workforce Planning Team focused on a solution to leverage our existing REDI Engineer Program. The purpose was to expedite the training and delivery of new hires to the field through the REDI structure. The team recommended using our in-house training resources to implement a six-month, intensive training plan focused on core tasks. With the training program in place, 20 REDI techs were hired and on-boarded in early 2011. Moving forward, a subcommittee will manage the program and evaluate resource needs.
Workforce Diversity
We think about diversity as all the ways we are different — beyond the conventional thinking of race, ethnicity, or gender. The power of diversity is how we utilize the differences in our team members’ backgrounds and experiences to deliver a better product or service to our internal and external customers. That approach stems from our LEAD Committee (Leveraging Experiences and Differences), which we launched in 2008 to propose the best approach for El Paso to build and sustain an inclusive work environment.
Many areas of the company have developed and implemented diversity action plans for their departments or teams. The LEAD Committee reached another milestone in early 2010 with the launch of a diversity and inclusion toolkit for all leaders in the company. Organized around four core diversity and inclusion action plan components — Practice, Participation, Promotion, and Progress — this toolkit contains information to help leaders learn more about diversity and inclusion, and provides resources to foster an inclusive environment across El Paso.
Our company policies prohibit discrimination of any type and our Equal Employment Opportunity Policy is available to all employees on the company’s intranet site.
