Selecting Employees for the Engineering Environment

1. The Promise of Skill and Discipline

When Selecting Employees for Engineering, Future engineers at the university and high school levels must contend with a minimum average grade—one higher than the norm for maths and science. Once degree work begins for engineers at university, their bi-annual scorecards are compiled into an academic record.

When engineering firms recruit new graduate employees, they look at the candidates’ academic records and decide whether they are interested. Other companies may opt to give bursaries to top-performing students and ensure they attract the best talent. Offering high initial salaries to graduates is another frequently employed technique to ensure the top employees can be recruited into the business.

2. Innovative Hiring

The big problem with these techniques when Selecting Employees for the Engineering Environment is that in many cases, the students with the top academic results do not, in practice, get the same results. Offering high initial salaries also attracts candidates who make their decisions based on salary and not necessarily the work environment they want to work in. This could lead to employees who lack loyalty towards the company.

Engineering, and specifically engineering projects, focus on teamwork and people. Academic capability is also very important, but in many cases, the top performers do not understand how to work in teams and want to take all the credit for themselves when executing a task.

Some of the latest trends involve testing to determine the employees’ culture and see if the employee’s culture fits the company’s culture. This sounds great on paper, but in practice, writing tests and conducting interviews to determine the employees’ culture can easily be manipulated.

So the question arises—how do you select graduate employees with very little knowledge of them?

The answer that works—we have found—is to get more knowledge.

This knowledge is not comprised solely of important academic results. We usually try to find all-rounders in our line of business, as most graduate engineers eventually move into a project or engineering management role over time. Even if the employee prefers to remain in the technical field, they will eventually have junior engineers working under them that they will have to manage.

Thus, looking for other activities on the graduate’s CV could better indicate their people skills and teamwork. Culture, sports, and leadership are good indicators of team players; staying in residence or being part of a community in some other way helps considerably when dealing with cultural differences in the workplace.

3. Narrowing Down Candidates

Once a shortlist of candidates has been selected, the next step is to meet them.

When meeting your potential employee for the first time, most companies opt for a formal interview process. The employee dresses up in a suit and tie and sits around the table with many old people, trying to determine their quality.

In reality, this is a terrible process. The poor potential employee is so nervous during the interview that they battle to get their words out. Another awful technique is asking the graduate technical questions from your industry to see if they have the technical ability. There is no way the graduate would know anything from your industry. Accept that you are getting a clean slate with enough logic to have passed their engineering degree.

A better process to follow is to select an informal venue for the interview. For instance, lunch at the local coffee shop would be a better option. When having the interview, surround the graduate with other younger employees who understand their way of thinking. This ensures that they are a lot more comfortable, and you will meet the real person as a consequence.

Although it’s hard to determine from one interview if the candidate will fit into your organization, you should get an idea from these processes.

4. Vacation Work

Another very good technique is to offer vacation work to potential employees during their studies. Many companies follow very formal processes that students have to adhere to to apply for vacation work. Students never apply—they don’t like the admin or feel it’s not the environment they want to work in. In other cases, students phone and e-mail potential employers to ask for vacation work, but the answer is usually negative, with some long story for an explanation.

By offering vacation work to several students, employees get cheap labour to execute some basic tasks and the opportunity to get to know their potential future employees.

A relationship with your local university is also an important part of recruiting new employees. We have found that working with the university on research and development—while paying the university and students for their work- is a great platform for recruiting graduate employees.

There is no set way to recruit new people to your business. Every company has its own way of executing this process. However, companies and managers recruiting people should consider the techniques mentioned above during their recruitment process to attract the correct talent to their company.

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