How to Fill High Demand Engineering Roles
The recruitment of Engineering staff within Civil Engineering, Structural, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Automation (to name but a few) is increasingly in high demand and the supply of quality candidates for these roles is consistently low. Landing quality candidates, just like landing fish, requires strategy and know-how if you’re going to get the best fish to bite at the right time.
Recruitment typically falls into two main areas, the contingent solution (no win - no fee) and the retained solution. Both have their own benefits but with limits to what they achieve.
Let’s continue our fishing analogy...
Imagine a lake; the fish are plentiful, with some even visible from the surface. Casting the net of contingent recruitment far and wide will certainly catch many fish but it doesn’t necessarily deliver quality over quantity. Competition is fierce in this area and typically the same fish is fought over in an attempt to get in on the table. Worse, the unsuitable fish are rejected and thrown back into the water only to be scooped up by the next recruiter’s net.
Now at the bottom of our lake are the big fish; landing these guys with the retained recruiter takes time and investment. Sail a big boat around the lake, locate the fish, dive deep and eventually you’ll be presented with the opportunity to harpoon that big difficult-to-find target but for this practice you’ll need plenty of patience and lots of expense.
Landing big fish with the retained recruiter takes patience and expense.
The key thing is that the technical roles that you seek to fill, slip into a gap between these two recruitment methods. This gap in the market is where we work. We frequent these waters daily, we’ve invested in the correct equipment and processes to understand the habits of the fish and the best bait to use. These are the fish that swim in the middle, the ones you can’t see, even though they are not at the bottom of the lake. They swim mid-way up, away from the dangers of the surface and separately from their big neighbours who reside in the deep.
We’re talking about the difference between active and passive candidates. With high demand and short supply, the active side of the market is very thin. High employment in our preferred disciplines makes the passive market extremely important. It takes experience, focus and determination not to spook these fish and when you have them hooked, essential skills are required to land them in the net as a keeper.
In order to save time and money you’ll need an experienced guide to catch these fish. An amount of patience, investment and time are still required but through our years of experience and knowledge of the engineering jobs market, harnessed to our focused approach; we have what it takes to attract the best candidates for your job.
If you are considering a recruitment campaign within Civil, Structural and Design Engineering then please contact us to discuss how Employment Solutions can bring the freshest catch of candidates to your company's table.