First Foray Into Asia Pacific

The Situation
Aker Kvaerner Subsea, decided in the middle of 2005, to set up a state-of-the art manufacturing facility in Pulau Indah, located in Port Klang.
The facility, which is officially known as Aker Kvaerner Malaysia Manufacturing Center, occupies about 150000sqmeters of the Port Klang Free Zone, and is the first tenant of the newly opened manufacturing site. With no experience in hiring in Malaysia, and little knowledge of the oil & gas market in Malaysia, Aker Kvaerner had the task of hiring the first batch of workforce for its fabrication yard, supply chain division, quality, project management and engineering divisions respectively. Being a new player in the industry, Aker Kvaerner has to be sure of the partner it engages, as this partner would be also responsible to recommend salary structure and probably, new roles and positions required.
 
The Mission
A solid workforce to be ready for its first manufacturing activity in September 2006. A pool of 30 technicians to be sent to Oslo and Aberdeen for training in the next 30 days.
 
The Approach
CnetG was engaged as the Recruitment Process Outsourcing partner. Since a large portion of the workforce will be highly skilled assembly technicians, CnetG reviewed and propose a new job description. Along with that, CnetG and the management identified key positions to be recruited at the management level. This recruitment exercise will encompass mass media and executive search and selection, so that the best talents are sourced from every nook and corner of the industry. We organized a recruitment team, based on their areas of expertise and commenced the search. The Hiring Managers gave us a deadline to work on. Although they were accomodative initially, the commitment they made to their management can't be compromised with. To make it more challnging, the recruitment was conducted during the major festive seasons and it was indeed a tall order to hire 30 candidates in a span of 14 days. We had not expected candidates from the offshore industry to read the advertisements placed in the papers, and sure enough, the response was poor. We sensed this at the early stage and set strategies to use multiple methods to reach out to the candidates.
 
What We Delivered
 
The Hiring Team, comprising of the Vice President for Manufacturing and the Assembly Manager, was kept busy with interviews each day, for the 10 days they were in KL. The end result: They left home with 32 candidates to hire. The following month, a larger Hiring Team comprising of the President of the organization himself, and few other Senior Management members flew in to interview and hoping to make decisions to hire more management members. Within a span of 6 months, CnetG hired over 50 employees and to date, has hired 130 employees, who are highly skilled, carefully picked and trained in their respective functions.
 
At the initial stage, CnetG was heavily instrumental in conducting a market survey and proposing salaries and packages to the management, in order to attract the selected talents.