Engineering and technical jobs are the lifeblood of most engineering recruiting and technical recruiting firms. Technology and engineering breakthroughs are also the essence of what drives marketplace success for both startups and established companies. As a result, the entire technical and engineering talent recruitment process needs to be precisely planned. To that end, it is essential that top management get involved early on. This should begin with the technical or engineering job description. Then progress to the design of the job application procedure, including how a candidate is asked to submit their resume. Followed by oversight of the entire interview process. Lastly, what salary the candidate is offered and final employment specifics.
Upper Manage Needs To Be More Involved
Unfortunately, few companies invest the necessary time and resources to make the technical and engineering recruitment process function smoothly. If much time is spent, it is usually on researching either: a) recruitment advertisement options or b) salary and benefits. Other parts of the technical and engineering staffing process are often overlooked. For example, rarely is upper management involved in the strategic planning of the interviewing process. That is why many executive recruiters we have polled recently have found that technical and engineering talent vacancies are lasting longer in 2015 than at any time since 2001! This is not only the case in Chicago where are headquarters are based, but also for many of our clients worldwide!
Mirror Question Can Help Improve Recruitment Process
All the mistakes of the engineering recruitment or technical recruitment process cannot be cured with one suggestion. However, one technique can significantly improve your interview process. As I have shared in the past, open-ended questions tend to elicit a lot more information from technical and engineering candidates during the interview. One such question is the Mirror Question (click on #7 below). Let me demonstrate this by an example. Let’s say that: a) you are interviewing a candidate b) you ask this job candidate who their best friend is and c) the candidate’s response is Joe. Then you might ask them, “If I were to ask Joe what type of person you are, what would they tell me?” Do you see what I did?
My over twenty-five years of recruiting experience demonstrates that most candidates will try hard to “mirror” that person’s actual response (e.g. Joe’s response). You can also plug in a wide range of people into the mirror question including past employers and co-workers. Regardless of whom you plug in to this interview question, this job candidate’s answers will tend to a lot more truthful. This will help you save time and money during your interview process. So remember to employ the mirror question during your technical and engineering job interviews.
What technical and engineering recruiting tips have worked well for you?
To learn how Strategic Search Corporation can help you to improve either: 1) your technical recruiting process, please go to our technical recruitment informational page or 2) your engineering recruiting process, please go our engineering recruitment informational page.
