Make Recruiting for Engineers Easier with These 5 Simple Steps

It doesn’t matter if you are building an app or designing a 5 story office building. Finding good engineers – software engineers, civil engineers, or similar, are absolutely vital to the success of your project. Despite this, recruiting for engineers can be challenging, which makes hiring the right engineer for your job difficult.

Instead of hoping to strike gold while blindly recruiting for engineers, follow these 5 steps to make the recruitment and hiring process easier for everyone involved.

Step 1: Clearly define the actual scope of work needed

These days, public job postings often double as company advertisements, with persuasive writing selling the job to candidates. That may be a great marketing strategy, but recruiters should be working with a much simpler definition internally. Using a simple, concise job definition when recruiting for engineers makes it much easier to separate the viable candidates from the time-wasters.

Step 2: Separate required skills from desired skills

Perfect is the enemy of good. Before looking for your dream employee, it is a good idea to first assess candidates for basic competency, focusing only on the technical skills essential to the job. By doing this, you can immediately rule out any unqualified candidates and identify those diamond in the rough types.

Step 3: Consider culture fit

This tip is not exclusive to recruiting for engineers. It doesn’t matter how great a candidate’s resume looks if they raise serious red flags elsewhere. It is important that any engineer you recruit has the attitude (and personal skills) to mesh with your team. See our blog on how to spot a job hopper for additional reading.

Step 4: Factor in time and costs

Internally, you need to know how much hiring the right engineer is worth to your bottom line. Do you have the time to devote months to the search? Can you afford to hire a slightly underqualified candidate with untapped potential? There are no objectively correct answers to these questions, as these are things that are unique to your situation and company.

Step 5: Evaluate soft skills

As with step 3, it’s important to remember that recruiting for engineers is about more than just identifying technical skills. Things like time management, organization, and communication are just as important to engineering as technical know-how, all things that should come to light during your interview process.

Need help or advice on recruiting for engineers? Connect with us today to learn more.