Engineer Recruiting: How to Craft the Perfect Job Description to Recruit the Top Engineers

The days of posting a job description for an engineering position and waiting for qualified talent to contact you are long gone. If you’re going to focus your efforts on engineer recruiting and attract top engineering talent, you must make a compelling case for why your opportunity is better than your competitors. It’s critical that you look at recruiting top talent as a marketing effort and write your job postings as such. They should read like a marketing ad, not a boring job description.

Generally, the top five things gold medal engineers are looking for are:

People: Talented engineers want to work with other talented engineers. They are looking for a sense of belonging. Make sure when you’re differentiating your opportunity from that of your competitors that you’re speaking to a culture with great and talented people and leadership.

Challenge: Top engineers are inspired by exciting and challenging projects and the chance to do something great. Make sure you cover this in your ad.

Opportunity: What does a career path look like within your company? Do engineers in your company move more quickly up the ladder than in other companies? Engineers want to see a path to a future that’s better than the one they’re currently headed towards.

When you speak to what the potential path looks like for a position, it helps showcase the unique opportunity your business provides. What type of growth can be expected for your business and the employee you’re looking to hire?

Also, make sure you’re speaking to your project load and backlog. Stability is important when you’re trying to attract someone away from their current role.

Growth: The movers and shakers in your industry are focused on getting better at what they do. It’s important that there are opportunities for professional development. This means you have to offer more than positional advancement. Top engineers want the opportunity to develop their skills.

Compensation: You must pay attention here and know your market so you can be competitive. You should be making offers that are at or above market if you are going to compete and land that key engineer whose resume can enhance your team profile and help bring in the projects you’re bidding on.

And compensation isn’t all about money. You have to make sure that you’re offering competitive benefit packages as well. A great benefit package can be the difference between hiring a gold medal engineer and losing them to your competition.

Engineer Recruiting: Crafting the Perfect Job Description

Rather than posting the ol’ status quo job description, try creating a marketing ad that looks something like this:

 

Innovative Civil Transportation Engineer Wanted

If you want to work on projects that have a significant positive impact on people’s lives…

If you want to work on a team with other passionate, high-performing engineers like you and a leadership that leads by example…

If you are looking for a stable, growing company with a backlog of projects and strong project load…

If you want an amazing opportunity to learn, grow and develop yourself…

Then you have found your dream job!

 

As with any marketing effort, you must understand your audience and speak to them – literally and figuratively. Your job posting, aka your marketing ad, should move them and speak to them on another level.

That’s because to attract the best engineers — you can’t just offer a better job. You need to offer a better life. A life with a rewarding career that only your company can provide.

Once you’ve crafted this compelling piece, shout it from the roof tops – get it on social media (LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, etc.) and get your team excited about getting it out to their networks as well.

In my experience, this approach is a game changer and will make a positive impact on the way you go about recruiting your engineering talent.

With these engineer recruiting strategies at your disposal, I hope that you’re able to attract the incredible talent that will push your business to the next level.

~Alissa