Halliburton Hires In Permian Basin

Source: Odessa American

Service company adds to workforce amid slow oilfield recovery

More than 100 job seekers funneled into the Odessa College Sports Center on Thursday for a Halliburton job fair. And their odds of landing work were the best in more than year.

Company officials said they expected to hire up to 70 full-time employees based out of the local Halliburton campus, mainly positions in maintenance and on frack crews. The company sought up to 40 additional hires at two other offices serving the Permian Basin in Brownfield and Artesia, N.M.

“Right now the market is starting to look better,” said Amanda Wade, who works in human resources in Odessa for Halliburton. “It hasn’t taken a huge upswing but the oil prices are maintaining and not going back down, so that’s good for us for sure.

Indeed there are some signals of a recovery, albeit tepid so far, from analysts and producers. The national rig count has climbed for two consecutive weeks amid a rally in oil prices to more than $50 per barrel earlier this month. Those prices slid somewhat since, with the national benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil price ending at $46.21 per barrel on Thursday. But there are still reports of Permian Basin oil companies contracting rigs with plans to return to drilling in the months ahead.

Halliburton had two sessions at the job fair on Thursday, and Wade estimated a total of about 120 people attended.

Halliburton officials declined to say how many workers the company laid off in the Permian Basin during the bust. Halliburton executives in April reported that worldwide the company has laid off about a third of its employees from its peak in 2014, or about 33,000 workers.

Some of the Halliburton prospects Thursday were former employees, like mechanic Juan Scuderi, a 29-year-old Midlander who said he was laid off a year ago but found new mechanic work soon after and still has a job that pays nearly as well as his former oilfield work.

“The pay can be good but if you don’t like it that’s a difficult thing,” Scuderi said.

Some were the recently unemployed, like 45-year-old Romero Ochoa, who said he was laid off from his supervisor job at the Odessa well servicing company American Safety Services about three weeks ago.

“I didn’t think it was going to happen,” Ochoa said, having held onto the position more than a year and a half into the oil bust. And he said he would not be picky in his search for a Halliburton jobs, having experience related to multiple open positions.

“Frack or maintenance, whatever comes first, whatever they hire me for,” Ochoa said. “I need a job.”

Others at the job fair already had jobs, like Fernie Sigala, an electronics technician in Odessa who said he was looking for new work because of limited hours at his current job.

“I’m only working 40 hours,” Sigala said. “My 40 hours were up yesterday.”

Some of the attendees drove hundreds of miles to attend the job fair after applying beforehand online, which Halliburton required.

Reginald Loftis, a 42-year-old former oilfield worker from East Texas, said he was unemployed after quitting his oilfield job in South Texas when the service company he worked for cut his hours to the point where “it wasn’t worth it anymore,” considering how far he had to travel for work.

Jerry Garcia, a 24-year-old, said he drove to Odessa from El Paso to seek a job in maintenance and begin a career in the oil industry. Garcia said he will graduate with a degree in the field from technical college back home in the coming days.

“I hope it’s worth it,” Garcia said. “But it should be. It sounds pretty promising”