Tips to Attracting and Hiring Top Engineering Talent

Engineers are in high demand, which means that candidates are not only looking for companies that excel in all areas but that they can also pick and choose where to work.

How can you make sure you hire the best engineer for any available position? Take a look at our best hiring practices and use this guide as a map for hiring great engineers for your team.

Advertising Company Culture

The term “culture" is used (and maybe even overused) frequently, but it is essential to engineers seeking a great work atmosphere. What makes a company's culture attractive? Here are some tips:

• Transparency: companies that operate with an open-door policy are popular. Leadership that is in direct communication with employees is essential to transparency and often an atmospheric element that candidates look for.
• Flexibility: highly skilled engineers prefer some amount of flex-time. Employees are looking for a combination of fully-remote, partially-remote and office-based work schedules Can they work at home one or two days per week? What is your policy on days off?
• Learning and development: does your company invest in employee education? Can employees attend workshops, gain additional degrees, and learn while working for your company?
• Keep your digital presence strong: does your engineering recruitment strategy include keeping your social media accounts current? Make it easy for candidates to find you through social.
• First impressions: your interview process should tell a candidate precisely what your company's culture is all about. Are you more formal or more structured? Make sure your questions, atmosphere, and general interview format follow the same culture mold.

Creating Long-Term Recruiting Strategies

How do you plan on recruiting the best engineers for your company? Do you have a strategy that involves working with skilled engineering recruitment agencies? Do you know how to select, keep, and hire the best candidates? Here are some strategies to consider:

• Reflective job posts: make sure that the jobs you post are representative of your company and brand. If you operate a small boutique agency and you hire through a standard automated application process, you aren't giving off a boutique vibe.
• Do you have a specific brand? It will be undeniable if you do not know what your company stands for or what your mission is. Before you can create a great team, you need to clarify your company's brand.
• Know where to look: sought-after candidates receive hundreds of LinkedIn messages from headhunters and recruitment agencies daily. These people are probably not going to respond to a generic email or job ad posted on a popular job site. Figure out where the candidates you want gather online and be selective.
• Keep projects active: creative and great content will keep people interested and guessing. Spend time crafting content about your company that candidates will be attracted to. Use video, photos, and other marketing strategies to engage potential candidates.

Writing Effective Job Posting

Job postings seem really simple to write, but the opposite is true. Do your job postings tell candidates what you're looking for? Are the messages clear? If not, here are some things to tweak:

• What is expected: do not list all expectations and requirements in a job post. List basic requirements and be clear about what the role is.
• List salaries: some companies list salaries on a job page. You can also list a salary range to keep people interested.
• Don't create a job title: have you ever looked at a job title that is confusing, unheard of, and unclear? Try not to do this. Instead, list the exact title that someone might be searching for. If your employees have specific titles that only apply to your company, it will be hard to attract candidates using keyword searches, and it will be hard for those candidates to list a job position on a future resume (big turnoff!).

Working With An Engineering Recruitment Agency

A recruitment agency can take some of the weight off of your shoulders while also providing you with expertise your HR team may not have. Recruiters specialized in software engineer recruitment or mechanical engineer recruitment know precisely how to find the best candidates and where you can find people other companies cannot.

Are you hiring the best all-around engineer for your team? Do you know what individual qualities make a great candidate? If not, take a look at this list of engineering traits we've compiled for some help. It's hard to hire a great engineer, but it doesn't have to be impossible. Consider working with a recruitment agency to make the process smoother and use this guide to help you figure out who you want to hire and how to find them.