It had been a whirlwind few months, and David Lee welcomed the quiet time that allowed his thoughts to drift among the clouds.

The 30-year-old founder and president of CrudeJobs.com, an Internet recruitment site for the oil and gas industry, felt charmed.

In January, Lee had launched his Calgary-based business. Here he was three months later, flying home from Houston where he’d just opened a second operation.

In the dot-com world, businesses were crashing and burning in a tumultuous market. But CrudeJobs.com was taking off — even making money.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
David Lee, left, and Jeff Ward

And in a moment, cruising at 37,000 feet, he was about to win another convert.

His seatmate, a Shell Canada executive, had recognized the Crudejobs.com Web site on Lee’s laptop. Curious, he asked how it would help Shell find new employees.

With a few mouse clicks, Lee walked the man through a demonstration. Today, they’re doing business.

“It’s amazing to see the lights go on in people’s heads,” says Lee, who created the private company last summer, raised funds (mostly from family and friends), and started the Calgary site Jan. 10. With the Houston operation now off the ground, Denver’s next in line, followed by New York, London and a host more around the world.

“I call it a controlled descent,” says Lee. “We have a planned roll-out. But if it doesn’t work in one market, we won’t move on until we assess the problem.”

The premise behind CrudeJobs.com is to help job seekers — at no charge — match up with energy industry employers. It isn’t a search service, but simply an advertising medium that puts the worker at the controls.

Under the system, anyone can view the job postings. As a convenience, the site allows any candidate to digitally store their resume, and thus quickly forward it to an employer when necessary.

When posting a resume the job seeker has three options. The resume can be fully public, meaning it can be viewed by employers. It can be viewed with the worker’s name and current employer blocked out. (An e-mail contact address is available.)

Or, the most popular option, it can be fully blocked off, meaning no one can view it including staff at CrudeJobs.com.

The employer pays a fee to post a job, or can pay to search the resumes that have been left for open viewing. Lee notes, however, that nearly 90 per cent of the approximate 15,000 resumes posted in Calgary since January have been kept completely confidential.

“In Alberta, the oil and gas market is so incestuous that everybody knows everybody,” says Lee. “That’s the joy of our site, it does offer that security to the candidate. If they are bold enough to list all their contact information, they are taking that risk unto themselves.”

Once a candidate posts a resume, they can search the employers’ postings as often as they like. And they can create a search agent that uses keywords to find specific jobs, locations and other preferences they might have. When an employer posts a job matching the search criteria, the candidate is notified immediately by e-mail.

“There’s never been a more effective and efficient way to find people,” says Jeff Ward, the 27-year-old vice-president of sales and marketing.

Since its Calgary launch, about 300 jobs have been filled. “I’ve seen people hired in six days off our site,” says Ward, a former rig worker who has also done sales and recruitment solutions for large international online firms.

The CrudeJobs.com Web site now has 50,000 unique visitors per month. A unique visitor is someone who spends at least 10 minutes on the site. If a person comes to the site 20 times a month, they are only counted once.

“The numbers are phenomenal,” says Ward.

While delighted with the early response, the oil and gas industry remains wary of the dot-com world, says Ward, who believes it will be 18 to 24 months before companies start using CrudeJobs.com as a single source of recruitment.

The company’s game plan is simple: register as many job candidates on the site as possible. The bigger the pool, the better, because that’s the attraction for employers.

Financially it’s a win-win situation, he says. The candidate pays nothing; the maximum an employer can pay is $300 per posting.

“Compare that to an ad in the Saturday Herald, it’s just crazy,” he says.

Another benefit is that employers aren’t blitzed with hundreds of resumes from unqualified people who’ve seen a publicly posted ad in a newspaper or trade journal.

Lee created the niche site because there was a need.

A former oilpatch worker, he started his own energy industry executive search firm, Profile Search International, seven years ago. Two things quickly became apparent.

The tools Search Profile used were increasingly coming via the Internet; and his oil and gas clients, who had tried using online companies such as Workopolis, weren’t getting results.

“They said they were getting maybe one or two resumes for a posting. I saw an opportunity.”

With the energy industry booming, Lee concedes timing was critical.

“The fact we were able to take the project from inception to completion in six months was important.”

As for the name?

“People say it’s brilliant,” laughs Lee, who acknowledges it was the result of luck and intuition. Last summer, after registering nearly 50 names — such as monsteroil.com and rigpig.com — during brainstorming sessions, he was told by a local marketing firm that CrudeJobs.com was the worst possible choice.

But he liked it.

“It was an insider name, and it just stuck in our minds,” says Lee.

On his recent flight home from Houston, Lee was looking at some of the public postings on his laptop. The Shell executive recognized the Crude.Jobs.com name, and asked for a demonstration.

Lee hit the search function, and typed in the key words “Shell and geophysicist.”

“The search came up with 20 resumes of people he knew,” says Lee. “He said: ‘Oh, that’s so and so, she worked at Shell three years ago. She was a pretty good employee.’”

The executive immediately realized the potential talent pool he could dip into, says Lee.

A light went on. Lee fastened his seat belt and prepared for a smooth landing.

Web Watch:

www.crudejobs.ca