Member Article

How to attract top engineering talent in 2014

Fantastic blog from our friends over at Extension HR, we thought it would be useful to share it!

At a networking event this week I overheard someone say, “it’s an engineer’s market out there”. Intrigued, I struck up a conversation to find out more and found myself agreeing with the concept but disagreeing with the solution.

At Extension HR, we have been recruiting engineers for over 10 years. From mechanical and structural through to process and project engineers, one thing has never changed: the top engineers are hard to come by and even harder to place. In fact, the shortfall in talentwas highlighted as early as the end of last year, with predictions that we’ll see a deficit of 36, 800 Qualified Engineers by 2050.

Why is this? Largely it’s because the opportunities are so big and so varied for our UK based engineers and we lose many of them to oversees projects. For those that have opted to stay in the UK, it might be down to family reasons or due to personal preference on location. Whatever the reason, it’s time to stop thinking about our engineering vacancies as opportunities for our engineers and start thinking of our engineers as being opportunities for our companies to grow.

What do we mean by this? Well, you know it when you see it and ‘it’ is when you hire an absolute star of an engineer, someone who could do the job of two others, someone who gets the marco and the micro, someone who sees issues and resolves them before they even arise, someone who can muster a team and communicate at all levels ensuring timely and safe delivery of projects.

So, we asked ourselves, what is it about our biggest clients that make them so attractive to those kind of forward thinking, multifaceted engineers and we’ve come up a top four list of ‘how to attract top engineering talent’:

Hire for tomorrow, not today:

There has been a real ‘boom and bust’ approach to engineering this year, with companies hiring for skills gaps in the downturn and not for the skills they’ll need to develop and grow the company. This is inline with the trends we’re spotting in engineering for 2014. So, rather than focusing your strategies on ‘gap fills’ think more about creating an opportunity too good for engineers to miss, one that is forward looking with room for growth and innovation.

Build a brand that engineers respect: A large number of engineering firms have been around for a very long time…and so too have their web sites! When engineers learn of your vacancies, they will weigh up interview offers based on brand, reputation, size and longevity among other factors. To help them in this thought process, ensure there is a lot of good news for them to learn about – contracts unveiled in the press, a web site that is modern and up to date, current employees boasting about their roles, benefits no other company is offering etc. It all contributes to your brand and this is as important in the recruitment market as it is in your clients’ market!

Bring in contracts engineers want to work on: It is understandable that during the downturn, some of the smaller firms have taken projects they might have rejected a few years ago. These projects tend to be either smaller in scale and therefore budget or larger in demands and in problems! Engineers are proud to put their name to big ticket items so try to bring in one or two contracts everyone in the business will recognize and can really get behind.

Be flexible on requirements and offer training to close the gaps: When you’re looking for e.g. an electrical engineer, you might come across a few hundred in your area. But, when you start drilling down how many have worked in a manufacturing environment, and how many have worked in your particular type of manufacturing environment, with particular manufacturing systems, that list of available engineers gets smaller and smaller. So, instead of looking for the perfect employee, search for someone who has the right general skills, the right attitude and the ability to learn the rest!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Digitia .