Recruitment is the process by which a company, through its HR department or a staffing agency, locates and attracts the right people to fill vacancies. For most companies, recruitment is an ongoing process, so that employees who leave the organization or are promoted are replaced by others, allowing the organization to develop. Recruitment can be an expensive process. A survey conducted by the Employment Management Association found that, on average the cost associated with hiring a person in the US are comparable with the average monthly salary in the country.
Particularities of recruiting technical staff
Employers all over the US still struggle with a shortage of qualified employees for high-skilled technology occupations. They are competing for technical talent.
Recruiting the right employees for the technical field is not at all easy, in a market where all companies want practically the same thing. It takes a combination of methods to discover the talents that will bring increased productivity to the employer and/ or to motivate them to change their job.
The recruitment process must be planned and correlated with the selection process, which verifies the compatibility of the candidates with the respective position.
If you must recruit technical personnel, you should turn to IT staffing companies specialized in this particular field. In the engineering area, job descriptions and requirements are apparently written in another language, and interviewing professionals in the technical field can be a real challenge for those without experience.
Evaluating people in this professional area is difficult, so you need to make sure that the staffing company you work with has the expertise needed to understand basic terminology and acronyms used by technical professionals.
According to a recent study, 52% of engineers would be willing to accept a job offer for a lower salary, if it were a company with a very interesting reputation (in a good sense, obviously). In addition, more than 90% of them would want to know more about the company, they would look for detailed information before accepting any position, no matter how challenging it may seem. Thus, the staffing company should focus on the motivational patterns, the way of thinking and the kind of details that such professionals need to make a decision.
Also, when it comes to recruiting technical staff, it should be mentioned that no hiring decision (regardless of the area in which the vacancy exists) can be taken exclusively based on the evaluation of the recruiter. The assessment of “soft” skills must always be doubled by a technical evaluation, and the best one to do it is the manager of the hiring company.
Essential in the recruitment process for technical personnel are the interview and, most of all, the evaluation centers, where candidates can actually prove their skills, not just talk about them. It is impossible to hire technical employees without knowing their actual technical skills, because those skills represent about 90% of the reasons why they will be hired.