How to hire in the energy sector

Every energy company says the same thing: the talent is not there. Some of that is true — there is a genuine shortage of power systems engineers and experienced project developers, and no amount of good hiring practice conjures them into existence.

Most of it is not. Most open roles in this sector are open because of decisions the employer made, and those are fixable in an afternoon.

The four things that keep a role open

You are screening on domain instead of ability. A listing that requires five years in energy for a data engineering role excludes almost everyone who could do it, in exchange for a domain vocabulary that takes a competent person about a month to pick up. The sub-sectors hiring hardest right now — storage, grid, flexibility — are new enough that demanding five years of sector experience is asking for a population that barely exists. Ask for the engineering, teach the energy.

Your title is a search term nobody searches for. "Flexibility Solutions Specialist" appears in no one's saved search. "Energy Data Engineer" does. Internal title conventions are worth less than being findable, and you can keep the internal one on the contract.

You have written a specification rather than an advert. A long requirements list is a filter that removes exactly the ambitious candidates you want, because the strong ones read eleven bullets, count two they do not meet, and close the tab. Three genuine requirements plus "helpful, not required" recovers a surprising number of applications.

You are competing on mission with everyone who has the same mission. Every company in this sector is decarbonising something. It is table stakes and it differentiates nothing. What differentiates you is scope — the specific thing this person would own — and that is what the description should lead with.

Write the description differently

Lead with the problem, not the company. "Our battery fleet bids into three markets and the optimiser is a spreadsheet. You would replace it." That is a better first line than any paragraph about the transition, and it self-selects for the people who find that sentence interesting.

State the salary. In this sector it is the single highest-leverage change available. Candidates moving in from tech or finance genuinely do not know whether an energy role means a 10% cut or a 40% one, and in the absence of a number many assume the worse case and do not apply. If you are paying competitively, saying so removes your biggest silent objection. If you are not, you need to know that you are losing those candidates anyway — you are just losing them later and more expensively.

Be specific about site presence. "Hybrid" covers everything from one day a fortnight to four days a week plus commissioning trips. Energy candidates expect some physical presence and are relaxed about it when it is stated. What loses them is discovering the real expectation at offer stage.

Say what stage the company and the project are at. Pre-FID, in construction, operating. This tells an experienced candidate more about the job than the responsibilities section does, and its absence reads as either inexperience or evasion.

Where the candidates actually are

Adjacent industries, deliberately. Oil and gas, utilities, industrial automation, construction, automotive, aerospace. Offshore project delivery is offshore project delivery. There is residual squeamishness in parts of the sector about hydrocarbon backgrounds, and it is costing companies their best available candidates.

Tech and finance people who want out. A real and growing pool, strong on engineering, data and commercial modelling, weak on domain, and often willing to take a modest cut for work they find meaningful — but only a modest one, and only if the role is interesting enough to justify it. See the point about stating salary.

Graduates, if you can actually train them. The sector complains about a shortage while running very few graduate routes outside the large operators. If you have someone senior with the time to supervise, this is the cheapest structural fix available and almost nobody at your size is doing it.

The regulated disciplines, honestly. Power systems, protection, HV design. Here the shortage is real, the pool is small and everyone is fishing in it. Compete on the interest of the work and on flexibility, and expect to pay.

What you are hiring against

Most of those are companies of twenty to two hundred people, which has a strategic implication if you are one of them. You are not competing with a large utility on package and you do not need to. You are competing on the thing they cannot offer: one person owning a whole system rather than one component of it, and seeing the asset they worked on actually run. That is a real advantage and it belongs in the first paragraph of your listing, not the last.

If you are hiring into storage or grid, know that you are in the most contested part of the market — which also means candidates are actively looking there, so a good listing gets seen.

Keeping them, which is the harder half

The sector's shortage is partly a retention problem wearing a recruitment costume. Three things account for most avoidable departures.

Projects that never finish. An engineer who joins a development team and spends three years on projects that are all still pre-FID has nothing to point at. Give people at least one thing that reaches a milestone, even a small one, in their first two years.

Progression that means becoming a manager. The sector is worse than most at technical ladders, so the only visible route up is away from engineering. Companies that write down a senior individual-contributor track keep the people who are best at the actual work.

Being the only one. The first data scientist at a developer, the first software engineer at a manufacturer — hired because someone recognised the need, and then left without a peer, without a manager who can evaluate them, and without anyone to review their work. If you are making a first hire in a function, budget for the second within a year, or expect to make the first hire twice.

Speed is the tiebreaker

The most common way an energy company loses a candidate it wanted is not compensation. It is a four-week gap between the second and third interview, during which someone faster made an offer.

Two things fix most of it: decide the loop before you post the role, and give a decision date at every stage and hold it. The sector's reputation for slow processes is earned, and being visibly faster than that reputation is a competitive advantage that costs nothing.

Posting a role

Listings here reach people already searching this sector specifically, and applications go straight to your own site or ATS — we never sit between you and a candidate, and we never resell your applicants.

Post a role, and what it costs

Writing the description and unsure what to call the role? Who actually does what covers the titles and what each one means in each sub-sector.