Inside the Energy Transition Talent Crunch

Kevin Warner has spent nearly two decades recruiting in renewable energy - from the first offshore wind farms in the North Sea to Australia’s current infrastructure boom. He talks to MCBI about how the transition was won, the talent crunch now confronting it, and the case for doing recruitment differently.

Ask Kevin Warner what keeps him up at night, and he doesn’t talk about deal flow or quarterly targets. He talks about how early it still is.

“We are at the very beginning of the race,” he says. “There is a long way to go.”

This, he argues, is the long game - Australia’s energy transition, the multi-decade project of replacing an entire generation system, rebuilding the transmission grid, and standing up the storage infrastructure to firm it all up. It is one of the largest pieces of nation-building work in Australia’s modern history. And the central problem, he argues, is not technology. It is not financing. It is people.

Warner is the founder and director of Talesca, a specialist recruitment firm working across energy, water and gas, with offices now in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. Talesca recruits across both technical and executive roles - from site-based engineers and project managers through to senior leadership appointments. Warner has been in the renewable energy sector for nearly twenty years - long enough to remember when there was nothing to recruit for at all.

From the North Sea to Adelaide

The story starts, improbably, with rugby.

Watching his university-graduate friends in London head off to interviews, Warner - then in his early twenties, with no recruitment experience - bought a suit and decided to try the industry himself. He landed the job because the managing director of the firm he applied to was a rugby fan and spotted his representative-level playing history at the bottom of his CV.

That accidental entry point dropped him into the renewable energy desk of a small London firm in 2009 - at a moment when “nothing existed in Australia. There was barely any renewables happening anywhere in this country. But in Europe, it was starting to take off.”

“If anyone’s ever flown across the North Sea recently, it’s just littered with wind farms, wind turbines,” Warner says. “When I first started working in this market, there wasn’t a single one of those erected.”

After seven and a half years in London, Warner moved to Madrid to roll out a global asset management division for one of the largest renewable energy companies in the world. The business had been on an aggressive acquisition spree, snapping up assets around the world - including in Australia - on the back of a financing structure that unlocked capital from its existing projects. It was a lesson in what happens when scale runs ahead of fundamentals. Warner remembers walking into the office one morning in July 2015 to find everyone yelling in Spanish, a language he didn’t speak. The company’s stock had collapsed from $35 to $8 overnight.

Warner arrived in Australia in early 2016, intending to spend a summer with his family. A decade later, he is still here. In 2022, he and his wife Korii launched Talesca. Korii has recently come on board full-time to lead operations, marketing and brand.

How the energy transition was won

When Warner arrived in Australia, renewables were, in his words, “beating their chest” - but the market wasn’t moving. Understanding why it eventually did is, he argues, the key to understanding where we are now.

He describes it as the convergence of three levers.

The first was the economics of generation itself. Through 2017, the cost of coal-fired generation crossed over with renewables. New coal stopped making financial sense.

The second was finance. Banks - NAB, CommBank, Westpac - became increasingly unwilling to underwrite new conventional power plants, both on cost grounds and under mounting ESG pressure. “The driver started coming from the finance side,” Warner says. “These banks are not going to go out and finance a new coal-fired power plant. They want to be green, they want to be socially aware.”

The third was the big end of town. Mining and resources companies, which had spent years lobbying against renewables as a competitor to coal, began to see them as something else entirely: an opportunity. Remote mine sites were burning “millions and millions of litres of diesel” to power their operations. Wind, solar and on-site battery infrastructure could cut that diesel dependency, meet ESG obligations to boards and investors, and refresh ageing generation assets in one move. The Rios and BHPs started building their own energy businesses.

Government followed the money. Renewable Energy Zones were established. Transmission infrastructure was prioritised. More recently, battery energy storage systems have arrived to solve the oversupply-at-midday problem, soaking up solar generation when demand is low and releasing it back into the grid in the evening peak.

The next decade, Warner predicts, will see gas-fired generation emerge as the firming layer; turn-on-turn-off plants that can stabilise the grid as the asset base continues to shift.

The workforce challenge no one can poach their way out of

Which brings the conversation back to people - and to why this transition is, fundamentally, a workforce story.

The usual recruitment playbook for an industry boom is to find an adjacent sector that is quieting down and pull skilled workers across. That playbook doesn’t work here, because nothing is quietening down. Brisbane infrastructure is “absolutely insane” ahead of the Olympics. Rail is busy. Mining is busy because everything else is busy. There is no slack sector to draw from.

International recruitment offers some relief, but less than people expect. Every country is electrifying simultaneously. The UK, Canada, India, the Scandinavian nations - they all need the same people Australia needs. Australia is competing globally, not picking from a surplus.

The COVID years did real damage. “Pre-COVID, it was very easy to sell the beaches of Australia to the world,” Warner reflects. The hard border closures shifted that perception, and while the reputation is recovering, it has been a barrier.

Talent flow runs both ways. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is pulling experienced Australians with tax-free salaries and the kind of greenfield projects that don’t come along often. “If you imagine building the first building in Dubai before Dubai became Dubai,” Warner says, “that’s what we’re talking about. These are cities being developed from nothing.” The United States was a major destination under the Biden administration’s clean energy push; that flow has reversed under Trump.

The home-grown side of the equation matters as much as migration. In 2017, Warner took the idea for Australia’s first Renewable Energy Grad Fair to the Clean Energy Council. It was oversubscribed within four weeks. That initiative eventually became Careers for Net Zero. But the work isn’t done; the tier-one engineering consultancies and developers run good graduate programs; the tier twos and tier threes still need to step up.

Doing recruitment differently

After two decades in the industry, Warner built Talesca around a deliberate counter-position to standard recruitment practice.

The firm leads with video. For every role, Talesca records a short video walk-through layered over the client’s website, accompanied by full supporting documentation - job description, organisational structure, employee value proposition, project context. The thinking is simple: candidates should know what they are walking into.

“There’s no smoke and mirrors,” Warner says. “It’s just we are what we are, and we do a really good job of it.”

The results back the approach. When Warner launched the business in 2022, response rates on LinkedIn outreach were running at an industry-typical 10 to 12 per cent. Once Talesca started presenting roles in full - video, documentation, no information held back - response rates jumped to 70 to 80 per cent. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says.

Talesca’s other deliberate differentiation is at the recruiter end. The firm only hires consultants with a minimum of eight years’ experience, typically drawn from adjacent sectors like rail, mining or energy - the opposite of the graduate-heavy model most agencies run on. The contracting business, led by recently appointed director Nico from Brisbane, is built on a tech stack designed for the realities of high-risk infrastructure work: Work Pro for onboarding, qualification and reference checks; Safety Culture for site inductions and safety verification.

And Warner is selective about who Talesca puts its brand next to. “I only want to work with organisations doing the right thing - not just in the day-to-day work, but actually the right thing by their people.”

What’s next

Talesca’s next chapter is an expansion into water and gas infrastructure - sectors that are more electrically intensive, and therefore more workforce-intensive, than most people realise. Water treatment and desalination plants run on high-voltage systems. Gas-fired generation will be a critical firming layer for the renewable grid over the next decade.

Asked to sum up what makes Talesca different, Warner returns to the same three words: authenticity, honesty, transparency.

“Business is a journey, not a sprint,” he says. “If you do the right thing by people, it comes back in spades.”

It is the long game. Talesca is one of the firms betting that the way you run it matters as much as how fast you go.

MCBI Insights - Conversations with the people building Australia’s organisational future.