How to Recruit IT & Engineering Professionals?

IT and engineering recruitment is about finding, assessing and employing professionals within technical and engineering roles. Having clear requirements, using the right recruitment channels, using technical tests and having an efficient interview will improve your chances of employing the right people. By using a skills based approach you’ll find the right people to fit your business’ requirements.

Many technical roles will require a range of skills to complete. However, you could struggle to find someone with the right technical background.

There are a number of reasons why technical roles can be more challenging to recruit for:

• Competitive market – Many employers will be looking for professionals with similar technical skills.
• Changing skillset requirements – As new technologies develop, this impacts what skills are required.
• Limited availability – There may be fewer candidates available for specialist roles such as cloud architects and cyber security engineers.
• Lengthy assessment processes – Assessments with multiple technical interviews can take longer.
• Salary expectations – Professionals with experience will receive multiple offers.

Hiring a senior backend developer can be challenging as they’ll need experience with API development, database management, cloud infrastructure and application security.

By having a clear job description to follow, you’ll have greater success in hiring. Otherwise, you’ll get applications from the wrong people and will struggle to narrow down your list of candidates.

Work with your technical managers to ensure your recruitment team know exactly what you’re looking for.

Think about:

• Technical skills – What programming languages, frameworks, platforms and engineering tools do you require?
• Experience – Entry level, mid-level or senior level?
• Responsibilities – What systems, products and projects will they be working on?
• Problem solving – What practical issues will the candidate be able to solve?
• Communication – Will the candidate need to work with others? Especially if you have an engineering team spread across locations.

Depending on your project you may need different skills for a software developer working on an enterprise application compared to an engineer working on embedded systems. Ensuring you know what you require will help your recruitment team find the right people.

If you’d like to look at having a structured recruitment process in place, look into Elite Maverick’s recruitment and staffing services.

Whilst posting the role on a general recruitment site may give you some applications you may not find people with the right specialist skills.

Having a good technical recruitment process will involve using a variety of channels.

You should also consider using passive candidates who aren’t actively looking for jobs. You want to ensure you’re attracting the right candidates.

Whilst knowing what educational background and previous roles someone has had is useful, you shouldn’t let this affect your recruitment decisions. Using a skills based approach will mean you can see what the candidate can do.

Within IT and engineering recruitment you can assess:

• Practical coding and programming skills.
• Experience with the right frameworks and technologies.
• Design and architecture skills.
• Troubleshooting and debugging skills.
• Engineering skills and technical problem solving.
• Team working and communication skills.

Instead of just recruiting someone with 5 years experience as a software developer you can assess their ability to create an application, solve coding issues and explain their technical decisions.

This will allow businesses to find candidates that can do what the role requires.

Using technical assessments can help you to ensure that candidates have the correct skills. Ask the right questions to avoid complicating things.

A practical recruitment process may include:

• CV screening – Ensuring they have the right experience, technical skills, certifications and previous projects.
• Initial conversation – Understanding what they’re looking for in their career, availability, communication skills and if they’re right for the role.
• Technical test – Coding test, practical tasks, engineering questions or role specific tests.
• Technical interview – Subject knowledge, decision making and problem solving.
• Final interview – Team fit, responsibilities, compensation and expectations.
• References and background checks – Ensure you’ve done the right checks before offering the role.

Ensuring you’re asking everyone applying the same questions will help you be more objective and reduce any bias.

Some candidates with the right skills may drop out of the process if they don’t understand what’s happening or it takes too long. Ensuring good communication will help.

To improve candidate experience you can:

• Provide factual details about the role and salary.
• Indicate the stages of the interview process.
• Be realistic about the time frame.
• Avoid having too many interviews.
• Provide prompt feedback.
• Be clear about the role and progression.

A positive candidate experience will affect how professionals view your company. Ensuring good communication will help build trust, even if the candidate isn’t successful.

Depending on how many people you need to recruit, what roles you’re looking to fill, what resources you have and what your project timescales are you can choose to recruit internally or with an external recruitment partner.

Finding professionals with the right technical skills, requires having a recruitment strategy in place. Elite Maverick offers recruitment and workforce solutions to help you find permanent staff, Contract/Temp staff, Executive Search and Bulk recruitment.Their website outlines how they can give you access to IT and Engineering professionals globally.

You can look into Elite Maverick’s background and recruitment approach to see more about their mission, workforce solutions and global reach.

Before choosing your recruitment partner, consider what they know about technical roles, what their recruitment strategy is, how they’ll assess your candidates and if they can meet your requirements.

Instead of measuring how many applications you’re getting, look at the following:

• Time to hire – How long it takes to successfully recruit.
• Quality of hire – How well new employees fit the role.
• Offer acceptance – How many of your chosen candidates accept the offer.
• Drop out rate – When candidates drop out of the process.
• Retention – To see if new employees stay with the company.

By tracking these you’ll be able to see where you’re causing delays, improve your assessments and make better decisions about your workforce.

For more recruitment insights, industry updates, and the latest company news, connect withElite Maverick on LinkedIn.

In order to successfully attract candidates for roles in IT & Engineering it is important to strike a balance between skills testing, sourcing and candidate journey. Having a clear understanding of the skills required, testing real skills and using appropriate sourcing methods to meet both your long-term and project requirements will be key. Focus on attracting professionals who will add to your goals.

If you’re looking to start your next technical recruitment project connect with Elite Maverick’s recruitment team to discuss your workforce requirements.