Trends of leading firms hiring highly sought after engineers.
We Have Built 'Trusted Career Adviser' relationships with candidates from multiple engineering disciplines Including: Mechanical, Industrial, Electrical, Safety, Software, Project and Civil Engineers, to name a few. Designers, Architects and Draftsman are also some of our highly sought after candidates by clients all over the country.
The facts are the facts:
Engineers are in HIGH demand. We don't use that phrase lightly either and it's a pretty good time to be an engineer right now. This means hiring managers are facing quite the recruiting challenge. The basic rule of supply and demand explains why the demand for skilled engineers is at an all-time high, however, the supply of these engineers is no where near what is needed to meet the demand.
Fun Fact Over the past 90 days prior to writing this article, there were more than 33,000 jobs advertised online for engineers, a 9% increase compared to the same 90-day period just a year prior. We have seen new highs in engineering opportunities overall, with more than 280,000 open positions... and growing!
Fun Fact Over the past 90 days prior to writing this article, there were more than 33,000 jobs advertised online for engineers, a 9% increase compared to the same 90-day period just a year prior. We have seen new highs in engineering opportunities overall, with more than 280,000 open positions... and growing!
Are you prepared to compete for the most sought after engineering professionals?
You'll need a full-time recruiting strategy to compete for the best engineering professionals in this highly competitive space. With all of this competition in the marketplace, it's more important than ever to be on top of your recruiting game. This includes being up-to-date on all of the latest trends in recruiting, which is why we've put together this list to help identify key areas your company should focus on if you have decided to take on the hiring process using only your internal resources and a traditional job posting service.
1. Only a handful of big fish are caught in small ponds
If you are fishing for world-class talent from the same pond your competitors are actively harvesting candidates from, the odds of you landing your big catch are very slim. Recruiting varies drastically by state. The easiest states to recruit from include Florida, Virginia, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona. The most difficult states include Texas, North Dakota, Minnesota, California, and Pennsylvania. This means you may need to not only budget for relocation expenses, but you'll need to have the resources to launch a national recruiting campaign. You must be willing to sail into uncharted waters if you are going to discover new land and you'll need to do the same when recruiting your next engineering professional if you want to separate yourself from your competitors.
2. Experienced engineers don't budge easily
More specifically, the most difficult experience level to hire away from a current employer is that of 7-10 years. Why is this? Engineers have invested several years in their firms. They want stability. They've established seniority at their current firm and are not looking to start over at a new company. Plus with something like, oh let's say a government shutdown, the newest employees are usually the first to get furloughed and subsequently laid off. Therefore, a firm looking to hire a skilled engineer with this level of experience must "sweeten the deal" a bit. That is a perfect segue into our 3rd trend...
3. Compensation is becoming very competitive
Salaries are quite competitive in the architecture and design sector, and extremely competitive in energy, primarily because of the scarce candidate pool. A few more stats to consider... 7 of the top 10 highest paid college degrees are in Engineering. Additionally, only 4.5% of college undergrads are in engineering and 74% of engineering employers have cited "lack of qualified candidates" as the biggest hiring challenge. So what does all of this mean? Too many jobs and not enough qualified candidates to fill them. When that gem of a candidate finally does come along, an employer is willing to shell out the big bucks in order to persuade the candidate to work for them.
4. Employment branding is an imperative part of your recruiting strategy
What is employment branding, you might ask? Put simply, it is how you explain to candidates WHY they should work for you over your competitors. By now, you know that candidates are scarce and when a quality potential hire comes along, your firm is probably NOT the only firm vying for them. Yes, you can throw lots of money their way, but you also better have a solid employment branding strategy. What is your company culture? Are work hours flexible? How extensive is the benefits package? The millennials you keep hearing about are taking many factors, not just salary, into account when deciding on where to accept a job.
5. Hop on the social media bandwagon
The Job board popularity of the 90's disappeared with the cast of "Friends" and you will have a to change the traditional methods of locating candidates and get creative. To be competitive in this era you MUST have a Social Media presence. Sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook can be great for getting your message to the masses or building brand awareness. A company blog that shares your most complex projects will give your company exposure to candidates seeking the more challenging positions with innovative organizations. I can't emphasize the importance of having an aggressive social media campaign enough. When you are trying to recruit new talent you have to approach candidates on their preferred communication platform and that requires a high level of technical expertise when utilizing these essential recruiting tools. If you aren't proficient at using these tools you should make it a priority to learn it very quickly or the bandwagon is going to leave without you.
The moral of the story is...
that if you currently have a full-time recruiting team that is monitoring these trends, implementing and executing strategies that they've designed to compete with multi location, highly capitalized engineering firms on a global scale, then you probably stopped reading this post a long time ago. My guess is that your company is a million times better at the revenue generating tasks that have led you to creating jobs and now has prompted you to hire a team member to help you continue building on that growth. If my guess is correct we'd like to talk to you and your team.
We work for free and contractually guarantee our work.
We are team building professionals that have successfully located, attracted, recruited and placed numerous engineering professionals from a diverse set of disciplines to the benefit of our clients. This is what we do for a living and we spend every second of every day and night executing strategically designed campaigns that keep our clients' pipeline full of actively engaged candidates that were driven to their engineering and design career opportunities through our dedicated team of recruiting professionals. We spend 100% of our time staying 3 steps ahead of the "Trend Setters" so that we can deliver the best person for the job to our clients. We have our finger on the pulse of passive candidates all over the world that carry a cell phone and are either directly or indirectly connected to our network of recruiters, corporate leaders or military veterans.
Our job is to listen and learn from our clients.
We need to gather as much information as you can provide about your companies history, operations, culture and everything in between. It is imperative that we dig deeper than a job description for us to be as effective as possible at identifying your ideal candidate and then being able to articulate everything about what makes this opportunity uniquely suited for their next big step up the ladder. All of the preparation and back-office work that our process is comprised of is like putting together pieces of a puzzle.
Industrial & Mechanical Engineering
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Professional Engineers & Designers
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Civil Engineers & Other Disciplines
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