When you’re trying to build a team of great engineers, you should be searching for the cream of the crop, rather than individuals who are simply “average.” Sure, you’ll pay more for these individuals, and they are much harder to find, but they’ll make the biggest difference in your company. There’s simply no replacing the passion, the knowledge, and the adaptability of highly motivated and intuitive employees.
So where do you find these people, and how do you hire them? To be honest, engineering recruitment can be very challenging, and may even take a couple of tries before landing the right employee. However, it’s well worth the effort for you to track these people down, and convince them that they should be working with your organization. Here are a few tips on how you can go about finding and hiring the cream of the crop, to take your company to the next level.
Diversify Your Sources
You can’t depend on a single source when you are searching for high-quality candidates. In fact, the more sources you have access to, the better will be your chances of finding top-notch employees to come work for your company. You can never tell which sources will yield gold, so you have to mine them all, and keep your eyes peeled for the most promising candidates.
Referrals should be checked out, former co-workers may yield candidates, in-bound career sites, college recruiting, conventional recruiting, and job boards such as AngelList, StackOverflow, and HackerNews. There are also several filtered marketplaces you should be monitoring such as Hired.com and Vettery. The more sources you have access to, the more likely it is you’ll find some really worthwhile candidates.
Offer a Great Culture
The great engineers all prefer to work in an environment that is stimulating and which captivates their imagination. If your workplace lacks that kind of appeal, you’ll likely have to do everything you can to reverse that situation, so that your organization becomes a desirable one to work for. Failing that, you can’t expect top-notch employees to want to be employed by your firm.
Look for Good Qualities
What kind of qualities do you look for in a really good engineer? Obviously, you have to thoroughly evaluate a candidate’s technical abilities, but your assessment should not stop there. You also need to take into account their ability to work on teams, how well they take ownership of their projects, their tenacity or determination to finish a job, the impact they have on the team, and the level of polish which they demonstrate on the job.
In addition to these qualities, you should also evaluate their overall brain power, how well they communicate, how strongly motivated they are, and how well they fit in with other employees at your organization.
Have a Formal Interview Process
Interviews are solid gold for interacting with candidates and picking out the qualities you hope to find in them, as well as how they express themselves, and their comfort level in a stressful situation. It’s not a bad idea to develop a scorecard where you can assign numeric values for qualities you are seeking, because this will give you a quantitative assessment of each candidate you talk with.
When you have a system like this, it takes the pressure off your interviewing team to come up with a certain feel for whether a candidate is right or not. Since this assigns an actual value to qualities you’re looking for, it’s a much more solid way of evaluating candidates.
You can make up your own rules when engineering recruitment about what a candidate must demonstrate to be hired, e.g. a certain score threshold. By the same token, you should allow each of your interviewers the power of veto, so that they can vote ‘no’ on any candidate whom they feel strongly against.
Enhance your Company Reputation
Whenever you have the opportunity to do so, you should take whatever steps you can to improve your company’s reputation in business circles. In addition to building up your company reputation, you should attempt to do the same thing for the teams you have at your company, and even your own personal reputation, since all three of these could factor into a decision made by a really good candidate.
It just might be that a candidate you really want to hire is torn between two choices, and chooses your company because of the reputation it has, or perhaps even because your reputation is that strong. At any rate, all really good candidates will probably take the time to research the reputation of an organization they’re thinking of working at, so you need to make sure that this is a positive, rather than a negative.
Hire Some Great Engineers
In the end, maybe the best way to attract some great engineers to your organization is to have some other great engineers on hand already. These individuals can provide firsthand knowledge of the benefits of working for your company, and they can become advocates on your behalf, to persuade additional talent to come into the fold.
Once you get those first few top-flight engineers on the premises and employed, it will become much easier to attract even more talent and to bring in more great engineers who can carry your company.
Engineering Recruitment Services From StreamlineHR Services
StreamlineHR Services is a full-service staffing and recruiting firm which works best when partnering with client companies and serving as an actual extension of those companies. We always strive to establish a lasting relationship built on trust and integrity, so that both sides can derive value from the relationship. With a huge network of professionals within a broad range of industries, we can find just the right kind of employees you’re looking for, and we can also help you manage your costs effectively.
We have a thorough understanding of the engineering recruitment market, and we will be glad to help you find exactly the right candidates you’re looking for.