[Mr.Coffee]

there's a lot of good advice in this thread. Two points however;

1. One thing I think that needs to be stressed is the whole 'don't contact HR and annoy them thing'... yeah that's a two way street. Do you know how annoying it is for people that are sitting around for months on end hoping they have a chance at a paycheque in a soft market?

If your ####ty process takes 3-4 months to hire a person (many companies seem to take this long these days) then at least have the decency to inform the handful of candidates you interviewed what's going on. I find that because it's an employers market in Calgary the respect has gone straight out the window and maybe a little empathy, decency and class would go a long way. People are out of- or low on money, putting a decent amount of effort (likely) into getting a chance to be your dedicated employee so the least you can do is send an email every couple weeks and indicate what's happening. And no, you're not THAT busy that you can't take the 5 minutes to write one email, copy and paste it 5 times change the name and fire it out if your process is still going on. If the HR people are too busy, maybe the hiring manager can. I dunno it's just one thing that's always bugged me when companies are like "yeah we'll get back to you" and then never do. It's pretty disgraceful, actually.

2. Confidence thing. Yes, confidence is important but humility in my opinion is more important. I want people who aren't alpha jackasses walking around. I want people who believe in themselves, but being arrogant is a non-starter, particularly because 90% of oil and gas technical / financial people are super arrogant and very judgmental. Drives me nuts and almost none of them are as good as they think they are. In fact if you act like that, then it basically insinuates that you aren't that good because your social skills are F-, so even if you're technically smart and a hard worker, you're still a dick that probably doesn't fit well into a team environment.