Hiring the right people is crucial to the success of any engineering company. Unfortunately, recruitment can be time-consuming, complex, and expensive in today’s skills-short environment.
If you don’t have an efficient hiring strategy, you could spend months struggling to fill the gaps in your team. Every extra day you spend finding and screening candidates contributes to additional lost opportunities and dipping morale among team members.
So, how do you make talent acquisition more efficient? Business leaders can explore a few strategies; however, the best method in the current challenging marketplace is to work with an experienced recruitment company.
The Role of Recruiters in Efficient Hiring
Working with a engineering recruitment company is the best way to make your hiring process more efficient and effective. Recruiters come in many forms, from internal recruitment teams to external companies and specialised hiring experts.
More than 90% of companies rely on recruitment companies to help them access wider talent pools, overcome skill shortages, and optimise their recruitment strategies.
They deliver excellent results regarding improving talent acquisition. External recruitment teams focused on the engineering industry are experts at streamlining hiring processes.
They handle various complex and time-consuming tasks, from sourcing candidates from different environments, ensuring you can build a diverse talent pool, and even giving you ways to improve the candidate experience.
The Benefits of Using Recruiters in the Hiring Process
On a broad level, working with a recruitment company doesn’t just allow you to access top talent faster. It expands your talent pool, helps you make better hiring decisions, and can elevate your employer brand, attracting more people to your team.
A recruitment company delivers:
Access to Larger Talent Pools
Recruitment companies in the engineering industry spend significant time building incredible networks and databases of potential candidates. They attend industry events, connect with new candidates and help you find passive candidates, comprising around 70% of the job seekers available to companies.
Time Savings
One of the biggest benefits of working with an experienced company is that they save your company a lot of time. Recruiters deal with various stages in the hiring process, identifying the right talent for the role, searching for and screening candidates, and shortlisting potential employees based on their skills and experience. This significantly reduces the workload for your HR team and helps accelerate the decision-making process..
Expertise
Recruiters specialising in the engineering industry have in-depth knowledge they can share with business leaders. They offer detailed insights into where you can find talent to fill gaps in your team and provide ways to enhance your employer brand and employee value proposition. They can help you understand what candidates want in the current market and determine which skills and characteristics you should be prioritising when making hiring decisions.
Enhanced Candidate Experience
A great candidate experience is crucial today, as an employer’s branding increasingly influences engineering candidates. Recruiters can help enhance the candidate experience, offering ways to conduct efficient interviews and managing candidate relationships to ensure applicants remain informed throughout the hiring process.
Cost Savings
Business leaders in the engineering industry often assume working with a recruitment company will be expensive. However, while recruiters charge for their services, they can save companies money in the long term by accelerating the recruitment journey and delivering better candidates.
Working with Recruiters on an Efficient Hiring Strategy
Working with a recruitment company is the best way to enhance your recruitment process, improve efficiency, and make better hiring decisions. However, there are several ways to improve your work with your engineering recruitment company.
1. Choose the Right Recruiter
The first step in ensuring you get as much value as possible is choosing the right partner to work with. The best recruitment company for your needs will have extensive experience, expertise, and a strong track record of success.
Do your research and talk to them about their approach to hiring, how they build candidate databases, their success rate and what they do to ensure you make the right hiring decisions.
2. Know Your Requirements in Advance and ask for Their Advice
An effective engineering recruitment company can offer advice on the skills and characteristics you might need to prioritise when making hiring decisions. However, have a clear idea of what your company needs in advance.
Speak to leaders throughout your company about the key skill gaps you must fill to improve your performance. Think carefully about the responsibilities your new hires will have and what competencies they’ll need to deliver results in their role.
- Collaborate on Stronger Job Descriptions
A engineering recruitment company can help to connect your company with countless candidates and talented professionals. However, you must still attract the right people to your role with effective and clear job descriptions.
A great job description should clearly outline the responsibilities assigned to your new hire the skills and attributes they need. Prioritise writing diverse, inclusive job descriptions without discriminatory or biased language, and ensure you’re drawing attention to your employee value proposition.
4. Perfect the Screening Process
Your recruitment partner can screen candidates for you, conduct background checks, read cover letters, and assign skill tests to potential team members. Since effective screening is crucial to focus your time on the right candidates, ensure you know your recruitment team’s methods and strategies.
Provide the recruitment company with clear instructions on what to look for when reviewing applicants.
5. Work With Recruiters on a Better Candidate Experience
Delivering an excellent candidate experience is crucial. The experience you give candidates will influence whether they accept any job offers you provide. It will impact your overall employer brand and ability to attract talent in the future.
Ask recruiters to communicate regularly with candidates throughout the hiring process. Let them know what kind of interviews you’ll be conducting so they can help candidates prepare effectively. Tell them how long it will take to decide so they can keep candidates informed after an interview has been conducted.
You can also ask your engineering recruitment company to help standardise the interview process, reduce the risk of bias in your hiring decisions, and accelerate talent acquisition.
6. Integrate Recruiters into Your Full Hiring Strategy
Finally, look for ways to embed your engineering recruitment company into your overall hiring strategy. Ask for their feedback on improving the candidate experience, sourcing more candidates from diverse environments, and streamlining your interview process.
Ask them to gather feedback from candidates you can use to enhance your employer brand in the future. This will give you a pool of relevant candidates you can tap into whenever a new gap emerges in your team. However, it will require you to commit to constantly communicating with the people in your network and keep them updated on the latest developments.
Recruitment companies are experts at streamlining hiring processes, enhancing talent acquisition, and providing crucial direction and guidance to business leaders.
Investing in an efficient hiring strategy is crucial for today’s business leaders. The more you optimise your recruitment process, the more time and money you’ll save when building an effective team. Recruiter collaboration is the number one way to drive better recruitment results.
All the best
Steve
At Coalesce we have been partnering with engineering businesses for over 28 years; if you would like our support on how to streamline your engineering recruitment process, then give me a call on 07512 821708 or email us here.