The bigger they are, the harder they fall: freelancers and umbrella company contractors in the oil and gas sectors complain that large firms are useless.
Or at least, that’s what one recruitment firm that deals with the oil and gas sector is saying. Twenty Recruitment recently went on record stating that it seems like larger firms simply don’t know what to do when it comes to recruiting oil and gas contractors. Instead, Twenty says that it’s the smaller firms that are truly employing these contractors to the best of their abilities – and as a result, freelancers are just flocking to them in droves.
This doesn’t surprise me in the lest, to be quite honest. For what it’s worth, freelancers and contract workers are much more in tune with the way smaller firms work; the self-employed always know and love a kindred spirit in a smaller-scale company, whether it be an oil and gas firm or any other sort of business, and freelancers are so well tuned in to the whole entrepreneurial spirit that it comes to no surprise that the work environment in an SME is just more amenable to the spirit of contract working.
Now larger firms need to learn the lessons their smaller counterparts – and their contract workers – are trying to teach them, especially if they want to remain relevant in the rapidly evolving economic environment of the 21st century. Serious problems such as the looming skills shortage means that building good relationships now with the country’s cavalcade of incredibly skilled and qualified freelance workers will enable them to have the network of workers they’ll need if the skills shortage turns into a long-term employee drought; as these larger firms dither and spin their wheels, smaller companies that are more adept at using freelancers will forge ahead quite famously and might even leave these larger companies eating their dust.
The modern economy means always adapting and evolving, something that both a highly flexible contract worker and a smaller-scale business are absolutely adept at doing. Larger firms, while more economically powerful in their chosen markets, suffer from the sort of inertia that can make change come slowly and haltingly. It’s evolve or die, and big firms are risking extinction if they don’t get with the times!
