How Robertson helped a small-cap gold mining company build out a surface operations team — and find critical finance talent — in one of the most remote corners of the American West
Robertson’s client is a small-cap gold mining company with headquarters in Nevada and British Columbia. It has an active gold mine site outside Hawthorne, Nevada which the company determined had additional output potential. The company turned to Robertson to build out its surface operations team in this remote gold mine, and later find a new controller for the mine, in one of the most logistically difficult labor markets in North America.
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The Client’s Needs and Challenges
The client’s leadership had identified strong potential in its existing mine asset in remote Nevada and moved to scale surface-level operations to increase its output — but the company had no internal recruiting function to lead the effort. Human resources for the mine was overseen by the Chief Financial Officer, a common arrangement at smaller mining companies, and there was no dedicated recruiter on staff.
The hiring need itself was substantial and varied: ten distinct surface-level positions, spanning skilled trades such as electricians and millwrights as well as exploration roles, all needed to be filled quickly to keep pace with the company’s growth plans. Several challenges compounded the difficulty of the search:
- Extreme remoteness: the mine site sits well outside Hawthorne, Nevada, itself a small and little-known town, and is only accessible by a twelve-mile dirt road off the highway.
- Relocation, not commuting, was required given the nature of the roles. Every hire required relocating to the area, supported by three months of company-provided relocation assistance — a significant ask for any candidate.
- Below-market compensation: with a market capitalization of roughly $72 million, the client could not match the wages offered by larger mining operations, narrowing the pool of interested candidates further.
- Specialized experience requirements: several roles called for prior mining experience, and in some cases experience specific to gold operations — a narrow qualification set in an already tight talent market.
While Robertson’s initial discussions with the client were regarding accounting and finance talent, recognizing the firm’s growing expertise in the mining sector, the Robertson’s team proposed taking on the client’s broader surface-operations hiring need — an offer the client accepted, and the relationship expanded from there.
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Robertson’s Approach
Robertson’s response was built around two of the firm’s core strengths: dedicated team-based execution and its expertise in finding highly specialized talent in remove locations.
Dedicated, role-specific teams
Rather than assigning the search to a single recruiter, Robertson deployed a four-person sourcing team working in parallel pairs, with each pair concentrating on a cluster of related roles — skilled trades, exploration, and other surface positions — while the account lead coordinated the overall effort and remained the client’s primary point of contact. The team stayed engaged directly with candidates throughout the process and joined every client meeting together, giving the client full visibility into who was working on its behalf.
Sourcing beyond the obvious channels
Robertson recognized early that a search for millwrights, electricians, and gold-mining talent willing to relocate to a remote Nevada site would not be found on traditional sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed. The team began there, then expanded systematically outward — to Facebook, targeted Google searches, and industry and community pages across Nevada, Idaho, and other Western states within reach of the mine. As direct sourcing surfaced candidates in the region, the effort evolved into a referral-driven search: asking every contact who else they knew in the area, and following those introductions outward from towns like Elko and Winnemucca until the effective search radius covered the Western United States. To avoid adding visa sponsorship as a further obstacle for the client, the search was kept deliberately focused on candidates already eligible to work in the U.S.
Data-driven, transparent presentations
Within two weeks, Robertson returned with a comprehensive presentation covering every role: outreach volume, response rates, and decline rates, alongside a full slate of candidates with title, experience, salary expectations, and visa status. The team also used these sessions to share market intelligence rather than simply asking for more budget — for example, flagging that the talent the client wanted were now commanding roughly $5 per hour more than the clientwas offering. The client raised its offered wage based on this data alone, without being asked. Robertson then incorporated the client’s feedback on each candidate and which roles had been filled and which were not, refining its outreach and messaging for the roles that remained open.
Constant, personal communication
Throughout the engagement, the account lead maintained daily contact with the client via text message — not only status updates, but learnings and insights — building a strong relationship that the client herself came to describe as once of mutual respect and trust. Calls were answered promptly, and when Robertson was struggling to find qualified candidates for a particular role, the team was candid about it rather than overselling progress, a transparency the client repeatedly cited as a reason she trusted the partnership.
Extending into finance: the Controller search
Once progress on the surface-operations roles was underway, the client asked Robertson to help with a new recruiting need: its controller was approaching retirement, and they needed to find a replacement. Because this search sat squarely within Robertson’s accounting and finance specialty, the account lead ran it personally, using LinkedIn outreach paired with direct phone calls sourced through Robertson’s proprietary talent database. Within roughly 48 hours of receiving the assignment, three viable candidates in Nevada — junior, mid-level, and senior — had been identified and presented, giving the client a range of options to choose from.
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Results
Robertson’s intensive and innovative sourcing effort delivered strong qualified candidates across the initial ten surface-level roles: within the first two weeks, the team presented 20 to 25 candidates, having built early momentum on six of the ten positions despite having no prior technical or mining-specific talent pipeline to draw on. The full initial project was completed within roughly two and a half months — a fast turnaround given the site’s remoteness, the relocation requirement attached to every role, and the client’s below-market pay scale relative to larger mining operations.
The controller search moved even faster. After receiving the assignment on a Tuesday, the account lead made outreach calls that Thursday, an offer went out Friday evening, and the selected candidate signed the following Monday morning — a complete search-to-signed-offer cycle of under a week.
The client’s feedback centered on three themes: the speed of Robertson’s sourcing, the transparency of its reporting, and the personal quality of its communication — describing the level of daily contact and honesty as something she had not experienced with other recruiting partners.
The relationship has continued to grow well beyond the original project scope. The client has since returned to Robertson for additional roles, and the client — without Robertson’s knowledge at the time — referred the firm to another mining company, roughly one hundred times its size, with operations including a remote site in Alaska. That referral has already produced a new six-position engagement for Robertson, split across the same team-based model that proved successful with this client.
Taken together, this engagement illustrates the combination that defines Robertson’s approach to hard-to-fill, remote-market searches: a coordinated team working multiple roles in parallel, sourcing methods that go well beyond conventional job boards, transparent data-backed reporting that gives clients real visibility and market insight, and a communication cadence close enough that the client relationship becomes a genuine partnership — and, in this case, a source of new business in its own right.
