Attract the Best Engineers With These Tactics

You already know that great hires play a huge part in your firm’s success. Although each and every employee plays an important role in your operations, good engineers are particularly important.

If you want to hire the best talent, you have to go the extra mile to attract that talent. Hiring the best candidates means competing for them. You’ll need to beat out firms from all over your area and through your entire industry niche to appeal to top candidates.

Offering a competitive salary and benefits is just the beginning. Your firm needs an extra edge that will set it apart and make it easier for potential hires to turn down competing offers.

Here are a few perks that will help attract the best engineers to your firm.

A Good Reputation

The primary aim of most marketing campaigns is to attract new clients or land new jobs.

But marketing also plays an important role in the recruiting process. When you make an effort to improve the awareness and perception of your company, it becomes a lot more attractive to job candidates.

Working for a company that’s recognized and admired by family and friends is a perk that potential hires might not even realize they were looking for. It can definitely lend an advantage over lesser-known competitors.

A general awareness that your company is doing great things, is making the world a better place, and is home to lots of smart, top-tier talent will go a long way.

Glassdoor interviewed one engineer who said, “If your company isn’t attractive on its own because of its technology and engineering culture, I probably won’t be interested in working there. Hearing about your company from a recruiter—rather than because of something amazing you’ve built—simply cements that disinterest.”

If your marketing efforts are effective enough at getting the message out about how great your firm is, you could have qualified engineering candidates contacting you all year. It’s this kind of sustained, consistent effort that will result in a full pipeline of job candidates waiting to work for your firm, which effectively eliminates the dreaded scramble to fill essential vacancies.

So, make sure that your marketing team is aware of your goals: campaigns that target both potential hires as well as potential clients.

Interesting Problems to Solve

The best engineers will be very interested in working on problems that are complex and exciting.

If you’ve done a good job marketing your engineering firm, as we mentioned, these “big problems” might already be common knowledge. But you can also get specific in the recruiting process about exactly what you expect potential engineers to be working on once they’re hired.

Brad Hoover, CEO of Grammarly.com, was quoted in this Dice article that companies who want to attract great talent must “provide an opportunity to solve cutting edge technical challenges, with other exceptional technologists.”

That’s true for many high-performing roles, and engineers are no exception.

Especially to those in the Millennial generation, the social mission of the company and its big-picture contributions to the world can make a big difference in how attractive any given job is. (Related: How to Structure Your Jobs to Appeal to Millennials)

People want to do meaningful work with their lives. If you can show them that they will be doing that at your firm, you can set yourself apart from those who are just trying to up the ante with solely financial incentives.

Remember that the work doesn’t need to be humanitarian in order to be appealing. It just needs to be challenging, and solve a real problem for customers.

The Ability to Concentrate on Work

Engineers and other workers who require deep, independent thought to get things done will really appreciate being given the ability to focus on their work.

At first, this kind of “perk” seems like a no-brainer. Many firms think that their employees have plenty of opportunity to get their work done. But the fact is that engineers who are expected to sit in meeting after meeting, work from an office where they’re constantly interrupted by colleagues and visitors, and asked to do other, unrelated work will begin to resent it.

This Harvard Business Review article on helping employees reach flow state has a suggestion for managers: “Loosen your grip on tactics like meetings and email, and focus on reducing interruptions and increasing engagement.”

Sometimes it’s difficult for managers to understand that each time they pop into an engineer’s office for a status update or question, it’s distracting them from the valuable work that they were hired to do.

Smart managers will structure engineers’ jobs so that non-engineering tasks are delegated to others who can specialize in them. This might mean hiring an awesome customer support team and administrative team that can handle all of your engineer’s supporting work.

Along with scheduling and delegation, managers should give engineers a workspace that encourages them to concentrate and discourages interruptions.

This is a particularly notable problem for engineering and design firms, many of which have adopted open floor plans at the office. Open floor plans can be great for encouraging collaboration and energy, but aren’t as great at helping employees concentrate. Employees working in open floor plans may be frequently interrupted by colleagues, but also by visitors or other people passing through the office.

If there’s no dedicated receptionist or lobby area, this problem becomes especially apparent. But even when there is a receptionist on duty, that receptionist can’t stay at the front desk at all hours of the day. They have to use the restroom and take lunch breaks, for example. And when that happens, visitors often wander into the office and interrupt the first person they see. (We call this the “person nearest the door syndrome.”)

Don’t let that “person” be your engineer. One simple way to combat “person nearest the door syndrome” is with an automated visitor management system like The Receptionist.

The best managers protect their employees’ valuable time by limiting interruptions. #receptionistapp Click To Tweet

Our tablet-based system allows visitors to check in on their own and communicate directly via that tablet with whomever they were scheduled to meet. Digital visitor management systems also make a great first impression on visitors, especially compared to standard paper check-in sheets. This can be a particularly nice advantage for engineering and design firms, whose brands often hinge upon being modern and tech-savvy. To start your free 14-day trial of The Receptionist, click here.