A newly hired engineer may enter any company with high hopes and a positive attitude, but all of this could change. If the first few days after hiring them aren’t planned well, it could spell out the employee’s disposition in the long run. Moreover, without a definite set of steps for welcoming new hires into the organization, all efforts to search for viable candidates might go down the drain.
Engineers who don’t feel welcome in their first few days may not see themselves staying within their first year. For employers, on the other hand, it would be a nightmare to go back to the drawing board again to look for new engineers, given a competitive job-hunting environment nowadays. They can only wish hiring tips can save the day. There has to be a way to reduce employee turnover rates through an intuitive onboarding process.
For engineers fresh out of recruitment entering your company anew, how can you ensure their first steps are the beginning of a promising professional journey? Here are three hiring tips you can follow to help you ease your new engineers into their roles and your organization.Â
1. Make the first day an enjoyable one.
Starting a new job is a stressful ordeal for many. Being familiar with new faces, getting lost in unknown surroundings, being overwhelmed with job expectation —all these can add to the anxieties your new engineers may already be feeling. Therefore, to keep the new hire’s worries at bay, encourage their team to build an atmosphere of camaraderie. Remind everyone that they are not simply welcoming a coworker but a new professional community member.
You also have to keep the first day as organized as possible by doing the following hiring tips upon onboarding:
- Have the new engineer’s workstation clean and ready.
- Make sure equipment such as computers and local phones are working. You may also want to print a copy of the necessary login details that the engineer must memorize.
- Leave a copy of the schedule for the day so that your new employee isn’t in the dark about what will happen in the next few hours.
How about arranging lunch into their schedule? Have the new engineer spend lunch with the rest of the team or have some volunteers take their new colleague out for a meal. Managers may also spend the last few hours of the day with the new engineer to check up on them and lay down their onboarding schedule for the next few weeks. This way, the engineer has a good outlook on what will happen in the coming days, and expectations are set on their actual job duties.
2. Include technical training in the onboarding schedule.
There is a misconception that onboarding is only about setting up payroll details, logging into the human resources information systems, and other employment basics.Â
On the contrary, proper onboarding assures that the employee is ready to take on their new role. For new engineers, it means preparing them for the functional aspects of their job. Letting them know of a training plan that includes enough time to acquaint themselves with their tasks specific to engineering will make them feel valued at the onset. For this, they would appreciate it if you acknowledged that they would be working at a human pace.
When laying down the onboarding plan for a newly hired engineer, remember to involve their future supervisors. Ask them what essential skills and knowledge new engineers need at the start of their roles and what training they will need to build solid foundations in their engineering job role.
You can also schedule the training and monitoring period beforehand. At least provide a general idea of who will deliver training and how long you will assess the new hires before they can be deemed independent. Then, once an engineer is up for full onboarding, all that’s left is to put dates on the onboarding schedule.
3. Set goals, and follow through on them.
An onboarding schedule is not a mere means to visualize a desirable turn of events. Also, if the engineer ends up being the only one following the schedule, it sends a message that their supervisors are not keen on looking into their progress. Therefore, identifying critical points and milestones in the schedule will not translate to valuable onboarding without enough follow-through.
An easy way to check up on the engineer’s progress without appearing too eager is to schedule weekly check-ups, perhaps at the end of the workweek. First, ask the engineers about their progress based on their perspective, then delve into which milestones they already achieved and which are currently in progress.
Make sure to touch on difficulties the new engineer may have encountered. Chances are they will be hesitant to speak about aspects of their new role that may have taken them back, but it’s part of their training to identify and face them head-on. Assure them that working toward progress is still considered progress even if they did not reach milestones for the week. This way, engineers will genuinely feel they are given guidance, and their efforts do not go to waste.
Agile WPS can take care of hiring and onboarding engineers for you.
You may gather all the hiring tips you can get to acquire the best engineers for your workforce, but nothing beats help from some of the best recruitment experts out there. Agile Workplace Staffing (WPS) is your premier source for staffing solutions in engineering, manufacturing, and life sciences. They can ultimately offer their recruitment expertise in these fields to you.
Agile WPS’ five years of experience in the recruitment industry allows them to suit their capabilities to the needs of any organization, not only in hiring but also in program management, order distribution, billing consolidation, supplier selection, and management, among many others. The firm has a myriad of services for you to choose from, all for improving company processes and reaching your goals.
With Agile WPS, your engineers will not only feel welcome to the company but will see a future of professional growth and career opportunities. Hence, hiring and onboarding engineers are worries you can cross out of your list when you partner with Agile WPS. To make onboarding engineers a worthwhile experience for you and the engineers you will soon hire, reach out to us on LinkedIn now!
Recent Comments