Odds ‘n’ Sods: Hiring can be a fine art

Recruiting geologists and engineers for a project can be a tricky business. For all sorts of reasons, someone who comes across well in an interview can be an absolute antisocial nightmare in the field; hygiene issues, weird proclivities and even weirder political or religious opinions, drugs … the list of transgressions is endless, but the end result is always the same; someone sitting alone in a corner of the cook house while everyone else plays cards and throws things at them.

I’ve hired geologists to work in Pakistan, Iran, and Bulgaria. The biggest success was a team of young Bulgarian geologists we hired in the mid-90s for Anglo American’s exploration office in Sofia. The four guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250 a month — good money in post-communist Bulgaria — they were thrilled to be working for a “western” mining company. Each of the guys had a different skill set to add to our group — prospecting, logistics, drill program supervision and so on; a competent and adaptable project team that we used all over the world.

A few years later, in 1996, I was on the hiring trail again, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to build a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.

Yemen is a beautiful country that has been well and truly screwed by decades of on-again-off-again (but mainly on again) wars. It’s also very tribal so you need good local knowledge to negotiate the complex inter-tribal politics. To make matters significantly worse in the country, most of the adult male population spends every afternoon stoned on the narcotic leaf Qat. Businesses shut down mid-afternoon while the men lounge around, big balls of masticated Qat leaves in their bulging cheeks, swallowing the juice. Apparently, the effects are excitement, euphoria, loss of appetite and a massive drop in anything related to productivity in the hot Yemeni afternoons.

When we arrived in the city, we were blissfully unaware of the complexities of Yemeni culture and naively got down to work to establish a field team. The plan was to explore a couple of zinc oxide projects and eventually to drill them assuming Yemen’s politics didn’t intervene and muck it all up (spoiler alert: it did.).

Our local contact in-country — a British expat called Don who worked for an Egyptian-owned oil company — had put feelers out to the local university and let them know we’d be needing three or four English-speaking geologists. The university drew up a short list and Yasar and I set aside a day or two for interviews hosted in a meeting room in the Taj Sheba hotel, a small oasis of calm amidst the total chaos of Sana’a.

On the appointed day, the first geologist was shown in for the 9 a.m. slot. Yasar and I were seated behind an important-looking desk armed with a list of stock questions to ask in simple English, including which of the local tribes they identified as; a vital piece of knowledge given the different traditional tribal territories we’d be working in.

The man was dressed in the traditional Yemeni men’s way, wearing an ankle length, long sleeved skirt-like garment offset by a formal grey jacket. Around his waist he sported a cloth belt holding a traditional J-shaped Yemeni knife, the Jambiya. I was well used to the sight of knife-carrying men and knew they’d come to the interviews sporting them as part of their business finery.

As the first geologist sat down, I looked up cheerfully from my notes to introduce myself, trying hard not to butcher the polite “salaam alaikum” greeting. It dawned on me mid-greeting that he’d placed a loaded AK-47 unthreateningly on the desk between us. Slightly alarmed, Yasar and I glanced at each other. Our geologist didn’t notice our worried glances. He was busy taking two live hand grenades and a nasty looking pistol out of his jacket pocket and putting them next to the AK-47.

The amount of weaponry shouldn’t have been a surprise to us. Most Yemeni men of a certain age openly carry a rifle, and some towns are known for their open-air arms markets where you can buy knock off AKs, rocket launchers, and go full-on Rambo if you really want to.

A man thinks of many things when faced with a heavily armed stranger. Front and centre in my mind was how the heck can I NOT offer this guy a job? He’s armed, he knows where I’m staying and at 6ft 1 I’d be easy to find in Sana’a where the average height is about 5ft 6. It’d take him five minutes to track me down and introduce me to his fully automatic recruitment guarantee.

The rest of the day went the same way. Every 40 minutes Don called in another geologist who’d walk in armed to the teeth, clanking and banging as he stacked his weaponry on the desk, while  Yasar and I nervously shuffled our notes. When their time was up, they’d stuff the weapons back into various pockets and holsters, belt their Jambiya, and leave with a polite goodbye.

In the end we arrived at a list of geos we wanted to hire, and I left the daunting task of informing the unlucky rejects to Don. Good old Don. Oh, and the project was a bust.

A year or so later, I was given a couple of months notice by my employer, Anglo American, that I was being moved to their concrete and glass head office along Carlton House Terrace in London, England.

Most of the major mining companies had offices in London. Rio Tinto, BHP, and a couple of U.K.-based coal miners were located near Anglo’s head office in St. James, just off Trafalgar Square. It’s a lovely, historic part of London to work in if you can put up with the hordes of tourists who come to gawp at Buckingham Palace, and then stroll around the lake in St. James Park chucking stuff at the pelicans.

I worked directly for Anglo’s global head of base metal exploration. Mine was a jack of all trades role — budgets, liaising with the regional offices, reporting, and so on — that involved a certain amount of networking with the other mining companies. For example, for a brief time, I was Anglo’s representative on the U.K. “chapter” of the International Seabed Commission. I would sit  around an enormous wooden table in the Foreign Office building, nodding sagely in meetings at the Foreign Office like I knew what I was talking about (I didn’t).

Another hat I wore was to represent Anglo as a donor on the awards committee of a mining educational charity: the Mineral Industry Education Trust (MIET), which was established to help earth science and mining engineering students by awarding three to four scholarships annually.

Each year we ran a selection process to find two to three students who would receive an MIET award. Applicants had to be a) eligible to study in the U.K., b) available for interview and c) accepted for the course they were seeking the award for. It was a useful way for the mining companies to spot nascent industry talent early, and it was a decent award for the students. Fifteen hundred pounds a year for the duration of the students’ degree, whether it was a PhD, MSc or Bachelors. And let’s face it, students always need money and geology students need more money than the average undergraduate to fund the regular field trips where they’re forced to buy beer to survive.

The selection panel was drawn from the sponsoring companies (assuming they wanted to take part), and a human resources person, usually from the company hosting the interviews. Each spring we’d receive a large envelope containing 15-20 pre-screened applications from which we’d choose seven or eight to interview in London. In the early summer, we put the kids through a day long interview process. Group exercises, presentations, interviews and essays; it was a fairly tough process that allowed us to home in on the best candidates.

One summer, we interviewed a kid who was coming out of high school and wanted to study mining engineering. He was Welsh, if I remember right. He was a big kid — a rugby player — who spoke with a thick accent and didn’t look remotely comfortable wearing a suit. As he walked into the room, the HR person frowned slightly.

The boy had come across as average in the other exercises that day. He wasn’t a natural public speaker and was a little shy in the group exercise. But it was when we asked him about his hobbies that things got interesting. He’d done some woodworking, which was good to know. He was a practical type then. And then he told us he’d built a forge in his back yard, to produce iron. A working one.

There was a moment of contemplative silence from the industry reps around the table — some knowing nods like we knew how to do it too (ha ha) — and then someone asked what he made from the iron. Tools and stuff, he said. Whatever took his fancy, but he was learning to do basic blacksmithing at 17 years old with home smelted iron. Teaching himself in the back yard next to dad’s shed, under the washing line, while the cat watched from the kitchen window.

Later that day, it was decision time. We huddled around the boardroom table and went through all the interviews one by one, comparing notes. Our Welsh friend was one of the last on the candidate list.

“What about this chap?” I asked my colleagues.

Before they could respond, the HR person piped up: “Oh no, totally unsuitable. Far too rough around the edges and his presentation wasn’t very good. We couldn’t possibly award him a scholarship.”

There was silence around the table and some uncomfortable bum-shuffling.

Then the chap from BHP (Eric) glanced at me and the Rio Tinto person in turn, with a look that screamed: “Who wants to tell them?”

I yelled back at him with my raised eyebrows “Go ahead.”

“Er … he’s 17 and wants to study mining engineering. He’s built a forge in his back yard, smelts iron and makes tools. If I’m underground and there’s a problem, I want this boy next to me solving the problem. He’s first in line for a scholarship, even if he can’t present. We’re not here to assess presentation skills, we’re here to find practical engineers and geologists.”

We took a quick show-of-hands vote on his award. The HR rep timidly raised their hand making the vote unanimous.

—Ralph Rushton is a geologist and has worked at mines and exploration projects around the world including stints in South Africa, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yemen, Iran and Pakistan. He is currently the president of Aftermath Silver (TSXV: AAG; US-OTC: AAGFF), a silver development company with projects in Chile and Peru. In his spare time, he writes about mining and exploration for his popular blog, urbancrows.com. He graduated with a geology degree from Portsmouth Polytechnic in the U.K., and completed a masters degree in geology at the University of Alberta researching the source of the placer gold in the Klondike.