Christophe Menger

From Moscow to the Kazakh Oil Fields

Menger moved to the CIS region, Russia and the former Soviet republics, in the late 1990s. He did not arrive with an oil and gas plan. He arrived as an executive search professional, working in Moscow in 1998, in a market that was still being written from scratch. The pivot came when he relocated to Kazakhstan, a country whose economy ran, at that point, almost entirely on energy.

That move changed the shape of his career. He went deep into oil and gas and, in doing so, crossed one of the industry's genuine dividing lines: from permanent, direct recruitment into contingent, staffing and manpower work. The two disciplines look similar from the outside and behave nothing alike in practice. One is about a single hire. The other is about mobilizing workforces against the schedule of a major capital project, following the largest operators in the world wherever their work takes them.

"That's how I really got into this industry," he says, "and more specifically the oil and gas recruitment industry." Almost three decades on, he has never left it. In a profession where many people cannot stay in one sector for five years, that kind of continuity has become his most distinguishing asset.

The People Who Shaped Him

Ask Menger who made him, and he names three men without hesitation. The first is Keith Hughes, his manager at Faircroft, now retired, whom he describes as a lasting memory. Hughes taught him the industry itself: not recruitment in the abstract, but the particular mechanics, rhythms and clients of energy staffing.

The second is Jonathan Johnson, his former CEO and now an executive director at NES Faircroft, where Menger himself spent close to two decades, 18 years in total. Johnson, he says, is still very much in charge and still operating, and had "a very strong impact" on how Menger came to lead.

The third is the best known. After leaving NES Faircroft, Menger spent close to a year working alongside James Caan, the founder of Alexander Mann and, to British audiences, a familiar face from Dragons' Den, the UK equivalent of Shark Tank. What stayed with Menger was not the celebrity but the mindset. Caan's approach to entrepreneurship, to how a business is conceived and built rather than merely run, was, in Menger's word, unbelievable. Roughly 70 years old now and still active, Caan remains a reference point in how Menger thinks about growth.

That instinct for recognizing quality in others extends to his competitors. Menger speaks with unmistakable respect of Kenny Davis, the former CEO of Global Edge in the US who built out structure in Houston and is now a non-executive director and a colleague. The two spent years on opposite sides of deals. "If there was one person, I would definitely recommend him," Menger says. In an industry that often mistakes rivalry for enmity, it is a telling remark.

Three Revolutions, One Playbook

Menger's perspective on artificial intelligence is unusual because he has a control group: himself, thirty years ago. "When I started my career, we only started with internet," he notes. "Internet never existed when I started my career, and then mobile phones were not there as well." He watched people insist the internet would revolutionize the world, and he watched that claim, eventually, come true. He watched the mobile phone hand recruiters something they had never had before, the ability to reach anyone, anywhere.

The pattern taught him something durable about innovation: the technology is not the variable. The response is. "It's how you embrace it and how you actually capitalize through that," he says, "and how you actually not try to fight it, but try to understand how that can help you really massively."

Applied to AI, his position is unambiguous. He sees it as a fantastic tool for growing and developing business, particularly in recruitment, and he believes the effects are already visible. Some people are resisting. Menger is not among them. "I'm one of those who actually embrace it, because it's there anyway." And, he adds, this is only the opening act. At the current pace of innovation, he is convinced the industry has seen only the beginning of what these tools will make possible.

The Case for Picking Up the Phone

For all his enthusiasm about the tooling, Menger's advice to anyone entering talent acquisition is emphatically human, and he frames it as the thing his own generation had by default and the current one must choose deliberately. When he started, there were fewer distractions and no alternative to spending hours on the phone with people. That constraint turned out to be a gift.

"Making sure you do not forget that building a relationship, a human relationship, has to be done," he says. Face to face is best. Failing that, pick up the phone, get on video, have the conversation. The trap he sees is not laziness but comfort: email and text feel easier, so people default to them, and he is careful to note that this is not a generational failing. Plenty of his own contemporaries do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason. "But you don't build human relationship through that. You have to engage with them. You have to talk to people." Used well, he argues, AI earns back precisely the time that human engagement requires.

His second lesson is shorter and harder: tenacity. This is an industry of rejection, of pushback, of being ignored, and Menger's instruction is simply not to let any of it register as a verdict on your worth. "Don't lose your motivation because someone has pushed you back and said, 'No, I'm not interested,' or ignores you. Just go ahead." There will always be someone further down the line worth talking to. After nearly thirty years across Moscow, Kazakhstan and the global energy markets, he has the receipts to prove it.