The hiring market for engineers is rapidly expanding. Technologists and engineers are increasingly in demand to fill jobs as companies try to automate their processes and do business in an increasingly technology-driven world. In a market where demand for talent is high, recruiters and managers are under a lot of pressure to hire new team members in a quick and efficient way.
However, the process of hiring an employee who commands an engineer's high salary is very complex. Scarcity of talent means that regular methods of advertising open jobs don't get you as many good candidates. Often, hiring managers lament that candidates who are brought in for interviews lack basic technical skills. The process of interviewing a new engineer gets more and more complicated and expensive as business needs grow more complex.
Engineering candidates looking for a new job face concerns as well. There may be dozens of fitting job descriptions available, but most read like uninspiring laundry lists of skills the candidate must have. Companies expect candidates to go through days of interviews without ever meeting their prospective teammates or learning what problems they'll be working on. Even after spending days on interviews, some companies simply never contact the candidate again, leaving them with a fairly low opinion of that company.
This book presents a simple step-by-step guide you help you avoid these pitfalls and successfully navigate the complex process of hiring engineers. With actionable advice, tips, and examples, you will have more engineering candidates to choose from and be more confident that those you hire are the best of the best.
The goal of this book is to help you consider each step in your existing hiring process from the specific perspective of hiring an engineer. Rather than a comprehensive guide to hiring in general, this book presents examples, outlines, and guides to the parts of the process you can specifically tailor to attract new technical talent. Filling a job is a marketing opportunity, and engineering candidates are your customers.
Chapter 1, The Job Description, covers the best way to market your company to engineering applicants. This includes how to communicate the responsibilities of the position to best appeal to a technical applicant, how to encourage applicants who fit your company's culture, and how to ensure that the technical requirements of the job are clear and precise.
Chapter 2, Recruiting Engineers, provides novel ideas for networking with engineers and building your corporate brand within the engineering community.
Chapter 3, The Phone Screening, includes a guide for HR representatives to evaluate the most important nontechnical qualities of an engineer, including sample questions.
Chapter 4, Code Tests, discusses what kinds of tests are most effective, how to write them, and how to evaluate candidates' work.
Chapter 5, In-person Interviews, provides checklists and guides to ensure that every person involved in the interview is prepared to best represent the company and evaluate the interviewee.
Chapter 6, Follow-up, Negotiation, and Closing a Hire, outlines a process for managing post-interview communication between all the parties involved; this is especially important in interviewing technical talent because of the expense and manpower necessary to evaluate candidates.
This book is for you if you have ever:
Struggled to write an engineering job description
Been disappointed in the quality of applicants you get from online job advertisements
Felt that your screening process was not getting you very good interview candidates
Felt disorganized or unprepared when interviewing an engineering candidate
Saw that good candidates slipped through the cracks during any phase of the hiring process
For HR representatives who are active in the hiring process but are not engineers, this book will give you an insight into how to make your company's jobs stand out and get engineers excited about working for you. For technical managers, this book will help you streamline your hiring processes so that you select better candidates earlier in the process and spend less time and money interviewing candidates who are a poor fit.
No matter what your role is, this book will provide you with easy-to-follow steps to the process of finding, interviewing, and hiring engineers. Using these guides and examples, you and your company will be able to build a stronger and more cohesive technical team.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
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