Or, how to interview a heavily armed geologist.
This is the first of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers.
Recruiting geologists for a project is 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 sexual proclivities (see Geologists Gone Bad), fucked up 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 nose combers 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 4 guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250/month -good money in post-communist Bulgaria- they were thrilled to be working for a major mining company that wasn’t owned by a Russian oligarch. 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.
Yemen
A few years later I was back on the hiring trail again for the same company, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to hire a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.
Continue reading “Arms & The Man”