Today’s engineering recruitment tip is: Be realistic. Many companies demand unrealistic employment requirements when seeking an engineer. As a result, engineer positions go unfilled for long periods of time! Not having the right engineer (e.g. AI, VR or robotics engineer) costs your company many thousands of dollars in lost productivity from not having the right engineer in place. Furthermore, projects get delayed and other job functions are adversely affected!
Instead, your executive recruitment team should focus most of its attention on the 2-3 most important job criteria for employment success for the engineer you seek. This is especially true for recruitment of high demand engineer positions such as:
- AI (Artificial Intelligence)
- Aerospace Engineer
- Automation Engineer
- Automotive Engineer
- Biomedical Engineer
- Ceramics Engineer
- Chemical Engineer
- Civil Engineer
- Controls Engineer
- Design Engineer
- Electrical Engineer
- Environmental Engineer
- Firmware Engineer
- Hardware Engineer
- Industrial Engineer
- Materials Engineer
- Mechanical Engineer
- Metallurgical Engineer
- Optical Engineer
- Plant Engineer
- Plastics Engineer
- Polymer Engineer
- Process Engineer
- Project Engineer
- Quality Engineer
- Software Engineer
- Structural Engineer
- Tooling Engineer
- Engineering Manager
- Director of Engineering
- Vice President of Engineering
Remember that engineering is one of the few areas where demand currently and historically exceeds supply. Furthermore, a good engineer is hard to find and easy to loose! As a result, you need to instruct both your internal engineering recruiters and external engineering recruitment agencies to follow four steps to ensure this focus.
First, have all members of your executive recruitment team rank order in order of importance your entire list of key engineering job criteria. Second, have each engineering recruiter (internal or external to your company) first focus on the top 2-3 criteria. Third, when you are interviewing talent for given positions, you need to first focus on the top 2-3 criteria to further reduce your pool of talent to a manageable number. Finally, when you have a good sampling frame of viable engineer candidates who meet your top 2-3 criteria then you can add other criteria to “separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Remember to be realistic in your staffing process. To help you do so, please go to http://www.strategicsearch.com/technical-recruiting-tips/technical-recruiting-tips.php and click on #12 below for a short instructional video I have provided on this topic.
What are your thoughts?
