Tips to Find the Best Engineering Candidates

Engineering candidates are typically all well-educated and highly prepared, but choosing the best candidate for your specific position can be difficult, timely, and expensive. Instead of committing the time and energy to find and screening the best candidates, you can utilize engineering staffing agencies.

Finding the perfect engineering candidate will include advertising the position on job boards that target engineers and other technical individuals. You will need to create a job ad that details the position, provides information about your company, and provides instructions on how they can apply to the position.  

Through the ad, you will collect resumes and cover letters from prospective candidates. You will want to run the advertisement for a set period of time then close it to new applications, unless you have not received an adequate number of applicants.

Once you close the ad, you can read through the resumes and cover letters you received to eliminate the ones that are not a good fit for the position. This will include applicants who do not have the experience or education you are looking for, as well as those who do not follow application instructions provided in the ad.

From there, you can narrow down the remaining applications to a shortlist of people you want to interview. You will contact those people directly and set up an initial interview. For an advanced position like an engineer, you will likely need to have multiple interviews with multiple candidates until you are ready to offer one candidate for the position.

Once someone accepts the position, you can file the remaining resumes for potential future candidates. During the interview process, you can utilize a totally free background check to run checks on your candidates to eliminate any that may not be eligible due to the results of the background check.

You will also need to verify their education and previous job references. All together, finding the perfect candidate for your open engineering position can take months and hours of work within your HR department. Of course, more substantial companies may have the resources to have a fully-staffed HR department, but many small to mid-sized companies do not have that luxury.

The other option is to utilize engineering staffing agencies like ENSER. ENSER does all the heavy lifting to provide companies with viable candidates who have already been screened and interviewed for a full understanding of their skills and abilities. The staffing agency will take care of the advertising, background checks, verifications, and other screenings to provide you with one or two candidates that would be ideal for what you need.

There is a fee to utilize the services of a staffing agency. However, the cost of those services is far less than it would cost to have one or more full-time human resource workers on staff. Even if you already have human resources employees, utilizing a staffing agency will cut down on the demands being placed on them and will significantly reduce the time it takes to find the candidate you need.

Often in business, owners are forced to look at what their time and the time of their employees is worth. If an outside agency can get the same task done in a fraction of the time because it is what they specialize in, then it is more cost-effective to use them then to have your team dedicated to the task. While this applies to all areas of business, it is particularly visible within human resources.