The Ultimate Guide to Recruit Engineers

According to some research , the engineering workforce will need to grow by 15% to meet market demands.

It can be challenging to hire great engineers when they’re already in high demand. However, having a good recruiting strategy and hiring process can help to attract the best engineers out there.

If you’re interested in finding the best engineers to help your business grow, keep reading to formulate the perfect recruitment strategy.

What Are the Challenges of Recruiting Engineers?

When it comes to recruiting engineers, there is typically a lot of competition. There is a high demand for qualified engineers, and companies are doing everything they can to attract the best candidates.

One reason that the competition is so high is that there’s a talent shortage of those qualified engineers. This can make it challenging for employers to even find good engineers.

Many of these engineers may already be employed and not actively looking for a new job. When this happens, recruiters have to target passive candidates. These candidates are harder to recruit than active candidates as you have to incentivize them to leave their current company.

Recruiters also find it challenging to hire engineers because this is a more technical field. That’s why it can help to have a technical recruiter who has all the knowledge of the industry and can carry out a technical interview before the candidates get to a hiring manager.

While all of these challenges can be daunting, there are a few strategies that will help you recruit top engineers.

Create a Hiring Plan

First, you’ll need to start with a hiring plan. You might want to ask a few questions to figure out your needs so that you can have a goal when hiring engineers.

For example, start by asking what the targets of your business are. How much does the company want to grow? How many new hires will you need to make to meet specific revenue targets? What are hiring managers looking for in terms of job requirements?

After that, you should figure out how you will attract a new engineering hire. That’s the first step, but once you’ve hired the engineers, you’ll need to find a way to retain them as well. To attract new hires, you should write appealing job postings, know which job boards to post them on, offer a positive candidate experience, and then have a good onboarding plan.

To retain them, you’ll want to make sure you’re staying up on the latest trends in terms of salary, benefits, and flexible working options. Routinely send anonymous surveys to see how your engineering team is doing and what you can improve.

Next, you’ll have to figure out the recruitment budget for the engineers. Ensure you know the budget for both internal and external hires.

Once you start doing this, you’ll have an excellent structured hiring process. When your procedure is more streamlined and efficient, you’ll be able to grab top engineering talent off the market quicker.

Focus on Employer Branding

Since engineers are in high demand, they can choose which companies they want to work with or not. And before they accept an offer at your company, they’ll read reviews to see what it’s like to work there.

You’ll need to ensure that your company has a clear, recognizable, and positive brand. This is how you’ll market the company to people and get candidates interested.

To figure out what strengths you have in your employer branding, ask yourself what makes your company unique. Are your salaries competitive? Do you have great benefits or unlimited PTO?

Are you a startup? What are the perks of working with your startup? Maybe you want to offer stock options so that people can be an owner of your company.

Sometimes for engineers, the top consideration isn’t always the salary. They may want to work with a good company culture with great coworkers. While some companies will pay them what they’re worth, not every company will treat them well.

Show off your great culture for engineers and promote what the team is doing. You may even want to showcase different engineering employees as well.

Regardless of your main brand messaging, ensure that it’s consistent across your job boards, recruitment emails, career sites, and social media posts.

Know Where to Source Engineers

While posting on job boards and LinkedIn can pull in some great candidates, a good recruiter will know where to source the best engineering talent. You’ll likely have more qualified candidates when you have a larger talent pool.

However, when you’re sourcing potential candidates, make sure that you remember that many engineers might not have a degree. For example, many software engineers taught themselves how to code, but they still have traditional job experience and skills.

Using sourcing tools like Recruiter.com’s AI software can help you find candidates who might not fit the typical mold but will still be great candidates. Recruiter.com’stool doesn’t account for education when sourcing candidates. Instead, they will look at technical skills, experience, and engineers’ work. Using this employment data, they can find a list of ideal candidates they may never have considered.

Even if you’re not currently hiring engineers, you should always look for new additions to your talent pipeline. A great engineer might show up, and then you’ll have the right candidate when a new job opens up.

Screen Engineering Candidates

As with any technical job, you’ll need to assess their skills on their resume or profile. Sometimes people forget to update their skills on a resume, so a quick screening call can check if they still have those skills.

It would help if you did a few tests. Do one to be sure that they have the technical abilities they say they are about. You should also do another test to see if they’re passionate about their career.

Keep in mind that there may be different skill requirements depending on the role. However, it would help if you familiarized yourself with the skills so that the candidate knows what you’re talking about. If they realize you don’t know anything about engineering, they’re likely not to take you seriously.

When identifying if they’re passionate about the technology, you should ask them what part of their job makes them excited. Why did they decide to become an engineer? Why are they still working in the field? This way, you can gauge if their passions align with the project you want to assign them.

Provide a Good Candidate Experience

Since engineers are highly sought after, you’ll need to provide a great candidate experience for them to consider engineering jobs.

When recruiting engineers, one of the essential things to remember is that the pay is competitive. In the United States, the average engineer’s salary is$95,000 . It would help if you researched to determine that you’re paying an engineer a fair and competitive wage. Otherwise, they might find somewhere else that will pay them more.

If you need an engineer but can’t meet the competitive pay, you may also want to offer different perks, like benefits, stock options, or more PTO. However, the most important thing to remember is that you need to move quickly.

When you’ve decided on a hire, make sure you send the candidate an offer as soon as possible. The best candidates are off the market in just ten days .

Start Recruiting Great Engineering Talent Today

You can use these strategies to attract excellent engineering talent to your business, but you might find that there are still some snags in your recruiting process.

If you need to hire engineers at once but don’t have the manpower, we’re here to help. Our recruiters can help on a monthly basis. Depending on your hiring needs, this solution can be scaled up or down.

We can also use our robust OnDemand sourcing pipeline to find great candidates for your open engineering position.

If you’re interested in these solutions and want to learn more, contact us today ! We’re happy to help you find a solution that meets all of your recruiting needs.

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