How to Hire an Engineer for Your Company

Recruiting engineers, particularly those with highly technical skills like software engineers, have become more challenging in today’s workplace market. As their specialization in digital technology and operations becomes sought-after, engineers have more advantages when choosing what job offer to take and what company they would want to join. 

For recruiters like you, the big task ahead now is: 

How do you ensure that you attract and engage top candidates as you hire an engineer?

Here are some simple steps for a start.

Create a strategic hiring plan.

What is your company’s purpose in hiring an engineer?

You can deliberately answer this question through your strategic hiring plan. A well-structured strategic hiring plan fleshes out what you expect from prospective candidates, the budget requirements when you hire an engineer, and the anticipated contribution of new hires to achieving business targets.

To help you recall better how to formulate your strategic hiring plan, make it clearly directed to three things:

• Your business targets for new hires
• Hiring budget
• A game plan to attract and retain new hires

Spend time to understand what the engineering role requires.

As a recruiter, it may be business as usual for you to map out the skills and qualifications needed for any given role. For instance, the common things you look for in a software engineer are an undergraduate degree, programming code knowledge, and other hard skill qualifications. However, you might also want to look into asking for a portfolio of work samples for engineering roles needing niche industry experience.

Let’s not forget that soft skills are critical, too. Hence, it would be best to have a clear idea of the soft skills you want as you look to hire an engineer. For example, being an effective communicator must be a trait of your prospective engineers since they will have to translate tech issues or concerns in easily understandable terms to other teams.

As you create your ideal hard and soft skills and other qualifications for the engineering role, remember that your salary offer must also be competitive enough. Given the stiff competition nowadays, you would want to sway top engineers with the generous compensation that they deserve. So research industry standards and work the salary around them.

Much as skills and salary figures are undoubtedly important, keep in mind that culture fit is equally significant. You would want to set up your engineering hires for success as you contribute to the company’s business outcomes. Long-term retention and ROI won’t happen when you hire an engineer who is a wrong culture fit.

Use engaging job ads to set your brand apart from the crowd.

So in the previous step, you’ve gathered all the information you need to craft the job description well. How do you use these to your advantage to engage and attract engineers?

Be accurate and detailed yet succinct as you write the job description. You must ensure that what the job description contains must be enough for prospective engineers to make an informed decision. A word of caution though, do not beat around the bush and use flowery words. As engineers read, you want to be spot-on and engaging by laying out the job responsibilities and requirements in a conversational tone.

Of course, the benefits section would be the highlight of it all. Entice them with competitive compensation, incentives, and other perks. Not all benefits to be highlighted are monetary in nature. You can also talk about work-life balance, professional growth, and exciting new projects that would tickle their innovative minds. 

Compose the job description with this question as your focal point: “Why would a prospect want the engineering role in our company over others out there?”

As you create a well-put job description, think of how you can make it visible on different channels. Particularly, leverage your company’s digital channels, like websites and social media. Your owned platforms are your free form advertising, so make good use of them. Consider that while it is beneficial to use all social media, it would be wise to focus a chunk of your efforts on LinkedIn with its talent pool of over 600,000 engineers.

Maximize interview and onboarding to engage and nurture the best engineers.

The interview is an opportunity for you to gauge better whether your prospective engineers possess problem-solving, technical, and analytical skills. Ask specific and insightful questions that will help you determine if a candidate truly has the right skills and knowledge that you’re looking for when you hire an engineer. 

For senior engineering or more specialized engineering roles, candidates will most likely be in high demand, so they are better positioned to choose from organizations that they deem to add value to their expertise. In such cases, the interview is your best chance to promote your organization and the incentives of joining your company. Which exciting projects will they be involved in? What are the training opportunities? How about work-life balance? Consider highlighting all these in your interview discussion with the candidates.

Once you hire an engineer, do not forget how critical onboarding is in their success during their first year with the company. Implement a strong employee orientation and onboarding strategy. Extend all the support you can to help them settle quickly in their role and feel at ease integrating with the team and the company.

Get help from an expert recruitment firm.

Searching for an engineering candidate who satisfies your job requirements and is a culture fit can be time-consuming, complex, and costly if mishandled.

So, is there an easier way to get top talents while saving you the troubles of the search? This is where approaching a recruitment firm like Agile Workplace Staffing (WPS) will prove helpful.

Apart from finding the best individuals for your organization, working with a staffing firm has many advantages. Agile WPS can assist you in gaining access to better talent networks and identifying professionals who can add value to your company to help you reach your business goals. We can also help you with a cost-effective strategy that enables you to reduce your overhead costs, save time and resources, and stay focused on your core business.

Contact us now to learn more about how Agile WPS can help you hire an engineer, particularly the best ones, for your company.