Guest Post: The 10 Best Reasons to Hire a Veteran

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The transition between the military and civilian worlds can be tough to navigate, especially when veterans re-enter the workforce. It can be difficult for former service members to explain and employers to understand how military skills translate to civilian jobs. But what companies often don’t realize is that, due to the rigor of military training, hiring a veteran can net a considerable number of advantages for civilian companies.

Here’s how your business can benefit from hiring a veteran:

  1. Veterans are goal-oriented: Military members get things done. From the day they start basic training, they learn how to perform tasks in a timely manner. They’re trained to keep their eyes on the prize and reach goals as efficiently as possible.
  2. Veterans are quick learners: Veterans are used to thinking on their feet, gaining and assimilating new knowledge under shifting conditions. This problem-solving and acuity helps them learn new skills quickly. Also, as a result of dealing with complex command hierarchies and supply chains, many veterans often excel at logistics, customer relationship management, and other areas beneficial to the process-side of your company.
  3. Veterans have clearances and security screenings: Many members of the military have already undergone extensive background checks, even for upper levels of security clearance. This can provide your company a level of confidence and trust(especially in the HR department). And if your company requires security clearances, hiring a veteran who already holds such clearances can save your company money and time.
  4. Veterans practice sound judgment: Military personnel are required to make decisions in the blink of an eye, and that requires the ability to make solid judgments of prevailing conditions and their own assessments. Throughout their careers, military veterans gain a considerable amount of experience deciphering when and when not to trust their intuition.
  5. Veterans are eligible for government-paid higher education: If there are a lot of opportunities to advance within your company that require classes or training, hiring a vet would be a good idea. The government gives veterans financial assistance for pursuing higher education. This means that if they need to take any college classes to advance within your company, the U.S. government will foot the bill, or at least part of it. In Canada, the Veterans Affairs Canada office provides service members who served 6 years with $40,000 worth of education benefits and $80,000 for those who served 12 years or more.
  6. Veterans have a strong work ethic: “Determined” is a word often used to describe vets. In the military, they’re accustomed to working long hours, often in less-than-ideal places. They also know that their team’s safety and success ultimately depends on their own completion of a goal to the best of their ability. As a result, most veterans have a well-developed work ethic.
  7. Veterans thrive in diverse workplaces: During their career in the military, veterans are exposed to a vast array of different races, genders, sexual orientations, places of origin, religions, backgrounds, and personalities. They learned to work with just about anyone, which means they’ll probably fit into your company’s team well and cut down on personnel issues within the office.
  8. Veterans are safety-conscious: Due to their training, veterans are continuously aware of safety protocols put in place for themselves and the people around them. If your company works with heavy machinery or potentially dangerous or hazardous materials, hiring veterans could be a great idea, as they often have a sharp eye for regulations and potential hazards.
  9. There are tax credits for hiring veterans: There are certain tax credits in the United States available to businesses that choose to hire military veterans. Online systems are available to help companies screen veterans to determine the best candidate for the job, as well as the related tax credits. Tax credits will be different depending on who you hire, and credits work on a one-to-one ratio for the employer’s income tax.
  10. Veterans are adaptable: Being in the military requires that members learn to adapt quickly, whether for job conditions, relocating to a new city, or myriad other changes. Situations can change at the drop of a hat, and military personnel are constantly required to be prepared for those changes. If the unexpected is liable to happen within your company, (and remember, unexpected things happen all the time!) hiring a veteran could help your organization maneuver through those situations with ease.

All in All

A plethora of benefits come along with hiring a veteran to work at your company: adaptability, work ethic, teamwork and leadership, efficiency, safety-consciousness, and sharp critical thinking. Veterans’ military training has prepared them for just about anything, instilling the skills they’ll need to obtain and succeed as part of the civilian workforce once their military career has ended. Fortunately, those are the same skills that will benefit your teams and companies, as well.

Connect with Brad Miller: TheMilitaryGuide.org

Pacific Coast Priorities: 4 Things on the Radar of Ian Martin’s BC Recruiters

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*Feature image by Rob Nelson www.robnelson.ca

British Columbia’s economy is hot and its unemployment rate certainly reflects that. Thanks to strong performance in industries including oil and gas, technology, tourism, finance and real estate, British Columbia wrapped up August 2018 with the lowest unemployment rate of any Canadian province at just 5.3 per cent. 

 

While this low unemployment rate is certainly something to celebrate, it also means that the labour market is heating up. Does recruiting in a job seeker’s market like BC’s require strategic shifts in approach to come out a winner in the war for top talent? We went straight to the source and asked some of our top recruiters in the province what they’re keeping their eyes on in the BC talent market right now. 

 

#1: Difficult-to-fill Positions 

According to a recent report by the BC Chamber of Commerce, two-thirds of BC businesses surveyed are struggling with difficult-to-fill positions, the majority of which are for higher skilled or senior positions. Nearly a quarter of those businesses had dealt with middle or senior manager positions being vacant for over six months. 

 

#2: Desired Skills and Experience 

The same report found that 45 per cent of BC businesses surveyed were only occasionally or even infrequently able to recruit candidates with the desired skills and experience over the past year. The two most frequent skills or experience found to be lacking in candidates were job-specific technical skills and relevant on-the-job experience. To deal with this skillset deficit, nearly three-quarters of employers indicated they routinely resort to hiring less-qualified employees and training them on-the-job. 

 

#3: Location of Labour Pool 

Another interesting finding in the report was the fact that 80 per cent of the businesses surveyed indicated that they frequently recruit new employees locally. When they look beyond their city, nearly the same number of businesses recruit internationally (4%) as from other areas within Canada (5%). This is interesting given the fact that it is often much easier to place from within the country.  

 

#4: Wage and Benefit Increases 

To retain staff, more than half of the businesses surveyed indicated that they were increasing wages (56%) and/or benefits (52%). Interestingly, business located in the Northeast of the province rely on wage increases as a retention strategy more often (75%) than in the Mainland/Southwest region of BC (51%). 

 

Having to pay increased wage and benefits costs isn’t the only negative impact BC’s labour shortage is having on the bottom lines of companies located in the province: over a quarter of the businesses surveyed (27%) reported that they had reduced their total business output or reduced or modified their type of product or service offerings to try to address the labour challenges they were facing. 

 

Partnering with a recruitment firm that specializes in placing technical talent is a sound strategy for helping your company not just survive but thrive through a very competitive labour market like BC’s. By hiring on contract, companies can hire strategically for their projects while attracting highly qualified talent who may not place a priority on long-term employment because they care more about flexibility, autonomy, and having the opportunity to accomplish a significant project that will help build their resume for more exciting initiatives in the future. Working with a recruiting firm like Ian Martin, with locations across the country, also makes it easier to connect with Canadian talent in other provinces who are willing to make the move for the right opportunity. 

 

If you’d like to learn more about how contract staffing can benefit your business, our Insider’s Guide to Technical Recruitment and 5-Minute Outsourcing Assessment are great tools to get your research started. 

 

How You Can Tackle Houston’s Labor Shortage Head On

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A recent article in Barron’s, “The Great Labor Crunch,” offers some pretty telling statistics about the talent crisis facing the U.S. right now, including:

“…with the economy in its ninth year of growth and another baby boomer retiring every nine seconds, the labor crunch is about to get much worse.”

“From 2017 to 2027, the nation faces a shortage of 8.2 million workers … the most substantial shortfall in at least 50 years.”

This labor shortage is even more severe in Texas. In the article, an operations manager from a Permian Basin oil company says, “It’s an emergency, a crisis actually. It’s causing major delays,” and goes on to add that he has never had such trouble finding and retaining good employees. His company now offers signing bonuses to workers that sign noncompete clauses to help improve retention.

The good news is that signing bonuses aren’t the only way to compete for talent during a labor shortage. Ian Martin has been helping companies source contract and full-time employees since 1957. Over that time, we’ve helped hundreds of companies thrive through labor shortages. Here are three of our surefire ways to rise above the competition when there is a war for talent going on in your city.

1. Stop posting job openings—start MARKETING them.

Want your company’s open positions to stand out from the competition on job boards? Think about the factors that matter most to potential employees and make these points the focus of your job ad. This blog post offers some easy tips on how to elevate your job ads.

2. Reach for the passive candidate goldmine.

It’s no longer good enough to post an opening on a job board and cross your fingers. According to LinkedIn research, 60 percent of the total candidate pool is passive. That means they aren’t looking for a new job but may be very open to offers.

Our Hiring Experts can help your company tap into this valuable pool of qualified talent. And check out this blog post for some creative suggestions for finding new ways to connect with passive candidates.

3. Treat your salaried AND contract employees in a way that makes them want to stay.

Keeping existing employees engaged reduces the chance of them leaving. Contract employees who feel like they aren’t treated as well as salaried peers may feel disengaged and opt for an opportunity with a different company.

Ian Martin’s Contractor Success Team increases retention and return rates of contract employees. Each contractor has access to a dedicated support team that is 100% focused on addressing any issues that arise related to their employment. Whether it’s a question about payroll, expense reimbursement, holiday time or income tax, Ian Martin contractors know that help is only a phone call, text, or email away.

Would you like more advice on how your company can come out on top in Houston’s job seeker’s market? As one of North America’s leading technical recruitment and project staffing firms, Ian Martin has an extensive network of over 500,000 talented candidates.

Get in touch with one of our Hiring Experts.

CIOs: How to Use Big Data to Recruit

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Are IT hiring issues keeping you up at night? This is a common problem for CIOs. IT professionals are in high demand, and CIOs need to fight for top talent. Top talent is hard to come by, and six in 10 CIOs worry skills shortages will halt their companies from keeping up with change. Since it’s so hard to find top talent, CIOs need to do everything they can to solve their hiring problems.

While you may not be able to hire as many great candidates as you’d like, your open positions probably attract many applicants. Since today’s job seekers often apply online, instead of through paper resumes, you have a lot of data about your past applicants.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re using all that data. The data could just be stored in your applicant tracking system or workforce analytics system. Data doesn’t do you much good when it’s in storage, but since there’s so much of it, you may not know how to start analyzing it.

If you can get a handle on all the data you’ve collected, you can use it to recruit the IT talent you need. This can help you solve your longstanding talent problems and build strong IT teams. But where do you get started? Here’s how CIOs can use big data to recruit top talent.

Clean up Your Data

Over the years, you’ve collected a lot of data. You could have thousands of resumes in your system. Not all of this data will be useful to you, and it needs to be cleaned up before you can do any analysis. If you try to analyze bad data or poor-quality data, you could end up with incorrect insights, which won’t be helpful to your recruiting process.

Cleaning up data is a big job. Data scientists spend 60 percent of their time organizing and cleaning data. Since you and your team are so busy, you may want to hire a data scientist to help with this task. It makes sense to outsource jobs your team doesn’t have the time or the skills to handle.

For example, you could have duplicate records in your system. Applicants may apply for many different positions at companies they’re interested in, so their resumes could be on file many times. You could also have incomplete data sets in your system. For example, if applicants never provided their phone numbers or email addresses, or provided them in unusual formats, their files could be incomplete. Random errors, like glitches in your system, could also cause problems that need to be sorted about first.

Some of the data could also be too old to be of any value. You may not want to include decade-old resumes in your analysis. The field of information technology changes very quickly, and you might not get good insights from older data. Decide how far back you’d like to analyze your data, and exclude anything that’s too outdated to be useful.

Gather External Data

You have a lot of internal data about previous applicants and hires, but there’s plenty of data available externally, too. Candidates’ resumes aren’t the only source of valuable information. Job seekers may be active on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and their public posts on these sites could be useful to you. Industry-specific forums, like Stack Overflow, can also be a good source of data. You can monitor these types of online forums and gather useful data to help with the recruiting process.

It’s harder to monitor external data than internal data. That’s because you have to head to the internet to find it, while internal data is already in your systems. Still, the hunt for data can be well worth the effort. It can help you learn more about candidates.

Use the Right Tools

To analyze the vast amounts of data you’ve collected, you need to have the right tools. Applicant tracking systems are designed to help companies search their data, so your existing tools may meet your needs. If you can use the tools you already have available, you’re off to a good start.

If your applicant tracking system isn’t letting you find the data you want to analyze, there are plenty of tools on the market designed to enable companies to use big data for recruiting.

For example, you could start using a tool like SwoopTalent. This tool lets you build a database across all your systems. If your data is spread among an applicant tracking system, a CRM, and paper resumes, this tool could help you see the bigger picture.

Other tools let you gather external data to use for recruiting. TalentBin is an example. This tool lets you gather candidate data from over 100 different websites, like social media platforms. You can find information about candidates’ personal and professional interests with this much data. The tool aggregates and scores each candidate’s information.

Determine Your Goals

To use big data in recruiting, you need to determine what your goals are. When you know what you want to learn from the data, you can quickly find it and put the data to use.

For example, you may decide you want to learn where your best applicants are coming from. You could analyze the data to see what percentage of applicants are coming from job boards, social media sites, referrals, or other sources. Once you know how your best applicants are finding you, you can invest more energy in those sources. If one source isn’t sending you many good candidates, you may decide to stop using it.

You could decide you want to see what universities your best applicants attended. When you know where your top applicants studied, you can put more effort into recruiting from those universities. You could hold a job fair at the university to hire top candidates before another company finds them. You could also search LinkedIn for candidates who attended the university in question.

You may decide to see what geographic areas your best candidates are coming from. With this data, you could see that many of your top candidates are coming from a certain city. You could travel to that city to hold a job fair. You could also attend conferences there to network with potential candidates.

Another option could be to find out what job titles your top candidates identify with. You could search sites like LinkedIn to see what titles candidates are using to market themselves. If you find a pattern, you could start using those titles in your job postings. This could help you attract top talent. For example, you could learn the Java developers you want to hire tend to call themselves Java Wizards on their LinkedIn profiles. Posting an ad for a Java Wizard could help grab their attention and get them to apply.

With big data on your side, you’re sure to improve your recruiting process.

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Why Some Industries Rely So Heavily on Contract Staff

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In some industries, like tech or engineering, businesses rely heavily on contract staff. Contractors are brought on quickly and then let go when the business’s needs change.

For human resource professionals, this type of hiring brings new challenges. In other industries, HR managers need to find the right employees for the job. In industries that rely on contract staff, they need to find the right employees, in the right places, at the right times. This is a much more complicated scenario.

If you’re new to an industry that relies on contractors, you may be wondering why companies don’t just hire full-time employees. Here’s why some industries have to rely so heavily on contract staff.

To Keep up with Changing Demand

Some industries, like tech, are heavily project-based. Companies in these industries work on multiple projects and have unpredictable needs. If a project is approved, the company will need to find more workers right away. If a project isn’t approved, it won’t need to find more workers. This makes maintaining a permanent workforce very challenging. Companies that rely on permanent staffing will have too many workers at some times of the year and not enough at others times.

Hiring contract staff makes more sense for companies in project-based industries. It allows them to keep up with changing demand. When a project is approved, companies can quickly bring on contractors with the help of a staffing agency. When the project ends, the contractors can be quickly and easily let go. This labour flexibility makes it possible to compete in a project-based industry.

To Get Specialized Skills

When companies have specific projects to complete, they need workers with specialized skills. While their permanent employees may be very talented, nobody can be an expert in everything. They may not have any permanent employees with the right skill sets. Or, they may not have time to train their permanent employees before the project starts. Waiting too long to get started can jeopardize the project.

To move on with their projects, they need to hire highly skilled contractors. These contractors have the right skills to complete the projects, and complete them both on time and on budget. Once those projects are completed, the company won’t need the contractors anymore and can easily let them go.

To Complete Projects on Time

When companies land huge projects, they need to finish them on time. Finishing behind schedule can damage a company’s reputation in the industry. These companies may have trouble getting future projects. For these reasons, projects need to be finished on schedule.

Contract staff can help companies complete their projects on time. By getting contractors to help during the time crunch, the project will be completed more quickly. The extra help also takes strain off existing employees. Without help from contractors, employees may need to work excessive overtime to get everything done. Excessive overtime tires out employees and can lead to mistakes.

To Attract Talent

Shifting preferences in the workforce have made contract work more attractive. These days, many younger workers are looking for flexibility and autonomy. Performing the same job for a couple of years can get boring. One- to six-month projects, on the other hand, are more exciting. Workers get the opportunity to accomplish significant ventures, and then they can move on to their next challenges.

By offering contract positions, rather than permanent positions, companies can attract talent. They can appeal to highly qualified professionals who may not be interested in long-term employment commitments. To find these professionals at the right times, human resource managers can get help from a contract staffing agency.

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The Do’s and Don’ts of Making a Hiring Decision

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You don’t have to be indecisive to have doubts about your hiring practices. Managers often have to balance short-term needs against long-term growth, so a position that might be essential to a company’s daily operations today may be obsolete in a few years. A prospective hire may also look great on paper, but then not live up to expectations once he or she actually gets the job. Either way, the wrong employee can cost your company valuable resources and make other workers less efficient.

So what can you do to ensure you recruit the best possible candidate? An ideal process requires diligent planning, but if you just want to make a few tweaks, follow these do’s and don’ts to give you the confidence you need to make the right hiring decision for your company.

DO: Be Personable

Candidates’ perception of an interviewer can play a major role in their behaviour during a meeting. If their potential boss seems cold or distant, they may feel uneasy, and this can affect their performance. While you don’t want to change yourself too drastically, and while candidates should be able to perform under pressure, there are things you can do to make your prospect feel calmer.

Interviewers commonly ask candidates to talk about themselves at the beginning of an appointment. This tactic may sound cliché, but it does give the applicant a chance to warm up and break out of their pre-rehearsed scripts. You should maintain open, friendly body language and ask follow-up questions throughout the interview.

While a candidate’s comfort is important, your needs should take priority. Don’t be afraid to push them for more information if they say something that is unclear or suspicious. An ideal interviewer makes a prospect feel welcome, but he or she still gets the necessary information to make an informed hiring decision.

DON’T: Ask Personal Questions

As the previous point shows, asking candidates to describe themselves or their personality isn’t totally off limits; however, you want to avoid probing too deeply with personal follow-up questions. Labour laws prohibit employers from discriminating against candidates based on their gender, age, marital status, sexual orientation, and more. If you ask a prospect about these topics, you could face accusations of biased treatment. While these regulations vary depending on your jurisdiction, it’s better to just avoid these questions altogether when you make a hiring decision.

DO: Include a Task-Based Component in the Hiring Process

If you hire a candidate, he or she will have to complete tasks to your standard on a regular basis. You’ll need to train candidates before they can reach their full potential, but a duty-oriented assignment can help you determine whether they have the basic skillset necessary to function in the desired role. This may not work for every position, but you can get your prospects to complete the assignment on site after the interview or send them home with it.

Just make sure you establish a deadline and clear instructions before they get to work. If you’re worried about how they’ll integrate with your staff, you could even get them to help out with a task around the office to gauge their compatibility.

DON’T: Overemphasize Experience

Previous experience seems like it would be an indicator of success. After all, if a professional thrived in a similar job, why wouldn’t he or she be able to flourish again? Unfortunately, making a hiring decision is rarely as simple as comparing resumes. Context is key in these situations. An engineer may have been the all-star at their last company, but if the employee is a lone wolf and your job requires teamwork, his or her past experience won’t make a difference. Instead of pursuing a candidate who’s experienced in one area, look for an adaptable candidate who learns quickly, who can work independently and as part of a team,and who knows how to take instruction and constructive criticism.

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Partner with a Recruitment Agency to Fill Mechanical Engineering Jobs

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You may be in for a long search if you need to hire a mechanical engineer. The field is broad, but hiring managers usually want a professional with a specific set of qualifications and skills. An experienced worker could not be the right fit for your project, even if they specialize in a relatively similar area.

These problems often add complications to hiring managers’ lives. They already need to prevent time and cost overruns, but they usually feel additional pressure to find the right employee. If a new worker doesn’t fit in well or offer optimal output, the hiring manager may take some of the blame.

Thankfully, there are ways to ensure your reputation remains untarnished. You should seriously consider working with a recruitment agency if you need to fill mechanical engineering jobs. These firms can help source, interview, and hire professionals who will work wonders for your organization. Read on to find out how.

They Understand Mechanical Engineers’ Unique Qualifications

Hiring managers aren’t responsible for recruiting just one type of worker—their reach is broad in scale and variant in scope. You often need to hire a range of professionals according to your company’s needs. As a result, you probably don’t have time to learn the ins-and-outs of a given position. Sure, you may understand a position’s requirements in broad strokes, but the minutiae of each engineering specialty may elude you.

If you’re filling mechanical engineering jobs, you need a hiring solution that looks at the gritty details of the job in order to get the best fit. Recruitment agencies know which traits make for good engineers. They can source prospects who will meet your needs and convince them to work for you. Why spend your precious time struggling to comprehend a position that’s outside of your skillset when you can put your trust in an expert?

Recruiters Know How to Make Your Company Look Appealing

Never take your company’s assets for granted. You may recognize your organization’s strengths, but others may need further convincing. Every job interview is like a two-way sales pitch. Interviewees try to sell employers on their skills, while employers attempt to persuade interviewees to trust in their company’s reputation.

You need to convey your organization’s positive traits to candidates if you want to find and retain the best talent. Recruitment professionals know what mechanical engineers seek in a position and in a company, and they can identify those characteristics in your company and bring them to the forefront. They’ll put your company’s best colours on display, which will help attract extremely qualified workers who are already engaged with your company’s values and goals.

They Can Access Candidates That You Can’t

It can be difficult to network in specific areas when you have to hire for an entire company. You can probably keep a few professionals in mind for later openings, but it would take enormous effort to do so for every position at your organization. As a result, your reach may be limited when you do go to hire. You may only be able to access people who are looking for work when you post a job. Unfortunately, the best workers usually already have jobs, so they may not know you’re hiring.

Recruiters can solve every aspect of this problem. They maintain candidate pools that contain professionals from a range of industries. This ensures that they’ll always have a qualified worker available. The right firm can also reach engineers who are already employed, so you’ll be able to hook a better employee if you make the right offer. You stand to gain so much from working with a recruitment firm, especially when you need to fill mechanical engineering jobs.

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5 Important Factors to Consider When Making a Hiring Decision

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Are you responsible for hiring engineers? This is a hard job. Engineers are in high demand, and recruiting top talent can be a challenge. Once you receive applications, you need to decide who to hire. As you know, you need to hire the best-possible engineers to take your team to the next level.

To make better hiring decisions, here are five important factors to consider when making a hiring decision.

1. Experience

Experience is an important factor to consider when you’re hiring engineers. If candidates have shown success in similar jobs, they’ll probably be able to replicate that success at your company. They have a proven track record of success.

When you have to choose between a candidate with experience and one without, it often makes sense to choose the former. This is especially true if you don’t have the budget or time to train new employees.

Of course, experience isn’t everything. It’s not enough to just hire the person who’s most experienced on paper. Make sure to consider experience, but don’t prioritize it over everything else.

2. Potential

When you’re interviewing candidates, you may encounter some people who seem promising, but don’t have much of a track record. They may be recent university graduates or people with only a few years of on-the-job experience.

Sometimes, you’ll decide to take a chance on a newer engineer. For example, you may interview engineers who graduated at the top of their class from an accredited university. While those candidates haven’t proven themselves at work yet, they have obvious potential. On your team, these candidates could grow into top performers.

3. Hard Skills

Hard skills are measurable, easy-to-define skills that applicants have learned at school or in past jobs. When you’re hiring engineers, you can’t ignore hard skills. If candidates don’t have the right skills, it won’t be possible for them to do the job without training.

For example, if you were hiring a civil engineer, you’d need someone with experience in AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and Microstation. Candidates without those hard skills wouldn’t be able to do the work successfully.

4. Soft Skills

While hard skills are essential, you can’t afford to forget about soft skills. Soft skills are harder to measure, and they’re often thought of as personality traits. For example, communication skills, work ethic, and being a team player are soft skills.

Candidates could have impressive hard skills, but if they don’t have the right soft skills, they won’t succeed on your team.

5. Cultural Fit

Company culture refers to a company’s personality. Every company has its own culture. For example, some companies have a culture of working late to make sure everything gets done. Other companies have a culture of leaving at 5 p.m. on the dot. Some companies have a culture of teamwork and socializing with coworkers. At other companies, employees work individually most of the time.

Whatever your culture is, you have to think about how candidates will fit in. When employees are a good cultural fit, they’ll be happier at work, which helps reduce turnover. Be sure to ask questions about cultural fit during interviews.

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CIOs: What IT Talent Scarcity Means for Your Business

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Skills shortages are very common in IT, and they’re only getting worse. Nearly six in ten CIOs now think skills shortages will prevent their companies from keeping up with the competition. CIOs struggle to find the top talent they need. Here’s what IT talent scarcity means for your business.

Hiring Has to Come Before IT Strategy

IT talent scarcity changes the way you can think about your IT strategy. In the past, when talent was easier to find, you could plan your IT strategy first. Once your strategy was in place, you could start looking for talented IT professionals to help you fulfill your strategy. You didn’t need to worry about not being able to find the right people.

Now, talent is so scarce you need to think about hiring first. If you think about IT strategy first, you could discover you can’t find people with the right skills and can’t move ahead with your plans. Some skills, like big data analytics or change management, are hard to find. Once you’ve secured people with those hard-to-find skills, you can set your IT strategy.

Company Culture Is More Important than Ever

IT talent is scarce, and that means IT professionals have tons of options. They can afford to think about things like company culture. Your company’s culture is your company’s personality. It includes the work environment, company mission, and vision. When your culture is well-known, candidates who like what they see will be drawn to your company.

For example, you could become known for flexibility and good work-life balance. Some of the best tech companies to work for are known for this type of culture. Employees who want to work from home, work flexible hours, or have more time with their families will be drawn to you.

Hiring Practices Need to Change

Talent scarcity changes the ways CIOs can hire. When there are plenty of people looking for work, hiring can be as easy as posting ads on job boards. You can be sure talented candidates will be browsing the boards, and they may apply for your positions. That doesn’t work quite as well when talent is scarce. All the great workers are already employed elsewhere, and they’re not looking at job boards. That’s why you get swamped with unqualified applicants when you post an ad online.

To hire successfully, think long term. Work your network and collect employee referrals all the time, even if you’re not hiring yet. When a position opens up, you’ll have several candidates to reach out to. While many may already be employed, they may be willing to talk to you about a job on your team.

Another strategy is to get help from a technical recruiting company. These companies specialize in finding IT professionals. Even better, they can find them quickly, so you can get started on your projects right away.

Retention Needs to Be a Priority

When you’re having trouble recruiting information technology professionals due to IT talent scarcity, your competitors are likely dealing with the same issue. They may try to get your top employees to leave and work for them. This is common for some in-demand areas of tech. For example, software developers who are just out of college can get up to 20 recruiting calls a day. Highly experienced professionals could get even more calls.

To hang on to your existing employees, remember to invest in them. One of the reasons employees leave is to learn new skills or get promoted to higher positions. With an effective training program, your employees can learn the new skills they want without leaving the company. Whenever possible, try to promote from within your company. When employees see they can advance in their careers without jumping ship, they’ll be less tempted to talk to your competitors.

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What You Need to Know about Current Engineering Demographics

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If you’re responsible for hiring engineers, you need to keep up with demographics in the industry. When you’re aware of the demographics, you can recruit the engineers you need more easily. Here’s what you need to know about some of the current engineering demographics in Canada.

Engineers Are Retiring en Masse

As you may have heard, Canada’s population is greying. There are now more seniors than children in the country, and that’s a problem for hiring managers in many sectors. As the population gets older, the average age of people in the engineering field increases. As time goes on, more and more engineers will retire. You’ll need to scramble to replace your highly talented engineers as they retire.

In Canada, engineers are typically between 30 and 55 years old, though this varies based on the field and the province. Civil engineers, for example, have a higher average age in Canada. In British Columbia, these engineers are an average of 50 years old, while in Manitoba, they’re an average of 48 years old. In Ontario, civil engineers are a comparatively youthful 42 years old.

Engineering managers are essential for your operations, but they have a high average age, too. In Ontario, engineering managers are an average of 49 years old, while they’re 48 years old in British Columbia. The youngest engineering managers are found in Newfoundland and Labrador, but they’re still 45 years old. The average age of engineering managers is expected to increase in all provinces over the next ten years. By 2025, they’ll be an average of 49 to 50 years old, depending on the province.

Demand for Engineers Will Outstrip Supply

Many engineers will be retiring in the coming years, but there aren’t enough younger engineers to replace them. In the next decade, Canada will be short 100,000 engineers. Canadian universities are trying to keep up. In 2015, there were 81,287 engineering students enrolled in undergraduate programs. That’s an increase of 32 percent from 2010.

Still, there won’t be enough engineers to go around. Companies will need to work even harder to recruit top engineers. To attract top talent, you may need to promise higher salaries or more diversified benefits. Or, you may need to offer a culture of career advancement to entice new engineers to choose your company over your competitors.

Some Skills Will Be Hard to Find

By the time the members of your engineering team retire, they’ll have accumulated many skills. These skills were learned through years of on-the-job experience. When these professionals retire, you may have trouble finding engineers with those same skillsets. While young engineers are qualified to start work after receiving their university degrees, it’s impossible for them to have all the experience retirees have. Of course, they’ll gain the experience and skills over the course of their careers, but that doesn’t help hiring managers now.

To find the specialized skills you need, you may have to widen your search for engineering candidates. This could include turning to candidates from other provinces or even other countries. If you’re used to recruiting locally, having to widen your search can be a big change. The methods you currently use to find engineers, like asking for referrals or going to local networking events, may not work as well.

To gain access to a wider network of candidates, consider turning to an engineering recruiting agency. Recruiters work tirelessly to find talented engineers, and they can find professionals you can’t. For example, they could have a network of engineers from across Canada, while you’re more limited to your local area. With this larger network, it’s easier for recruiters to locate engineers with hard-to-find skills.

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What Happens When Talent Needs Change from Quarter to Quarter?

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Do your talent needs change from quarter to quarter? That’s a common problem in some industries. In industries that are project-based, it’s hard to predict how many workers you’ll need next week, let alone next month. If a project gets approved, you’ll need to hire talented contract workers almost immediately.

In companies with rapidly changing staffing needs, the human resources department needs to play a highly strategic role. It’s not enough to just find the right workers in this hyper-competitive employment market. You need to find the right workers at the right time.

A company’s project timeline won’t always match with the timelines of the contract workers it wants to hire. So, how can chief HR officers get the top talent they need on impossibly tight timelines? The secret is to work with a contract staffing agency. Here’s how an agency can help you meet your talent needs.

Find Specialized Workers

Short-term projects require contract workers with specialized skills. Specialized work needs to be completed on a short timeframe, making it the best time to hire contract workers. This means there’s no time to train a generalist to complete the tasks. You need to find a contract worker who already has the high-level technical or engineering skills you need.

These specialized workers can be difficult to find on your own. First of all, they probably already have jobs. Highly talented contract workers don’t stay on the market for long, and they may be helping your competitors with projects. It’s hard to reach out to these workers on your own. While these passive candidates might be willing to join a new company, they may not want to talk to a human resource manager.

This is where contract staffing agencies come in. Their recruiters have large networks of the highly trained workers you need to hire. Since they already have these connections, it’s easier for them to reach out. If talented workers are interested in joining your projects, the recruiters can refer them to you.

Fill Contract Positions Quickly

It takes time to fill contract positions on your own. Your human resource employees need to post ads for the specialized positions the project team needs. Then, they need to wait for applicants to find the ads, and send in their applications. Sorting through hundreds—or thousands—of applications takes even more time. Then, HR needs to set up interviews, conduct those interviews, and make offers. By the time they find the perfect contractors to join the project, the project could already be wrapping up! There’s just not enough time to hire traditionally when talent needs change so quickly.

Contract staffing agencies can provide the contract workers you need before your project starts. How are they so much faster than your HR team? Agencies already have large networks of contractors they can call on. These contractors are pre-vetted, so the process is much faster. You’ll still need to conduct interviews and choose the contractors you want to hire, but the time-consuming aspects of hiring are already done for you.

Help with Onboarding

When you’re hiring contract workers for a short-term project that’s starting immediately, there isn’t time for much onboarding. Full-time employees will work on many projects over their years of employment, so onboarding and training are a good investment. With contract workers, not so much. By the time someone is onboarded, the project could be over.

Contract staffing agencies can help you onboard your contractors. That way, they’ll be ready to start work on day one of the project. They won’t need any time to get up to speed, since they’ll already be prepared.

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The Ultimate Guide to the Global Automotive Infotainment Industry

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Electronics engineers are some of the most in-demand engineers in Canada. That makes it challenging to find engineers for your company’s automotive infotainment projects. Companies need to compete to get the best engineers for their infotainment teams.

The more you know about the automotive infotainment industry, the easier it will be for you to recruit the talented engineers you need. Here’s your ultimate guide to the global automotive infotainment industry.

Major Segments of the Industry

There are many types of products that electronics engineers work on. To hire engineers, you need to be familiar with some of these products. Engineers will want to know details about what projects your company is working on. While you may not be able to divulge too much about projects in development, you’ll have a hard time hiring without sharing general details.

Navigation and connectivity are growing segments of the industry. Navigation refers to the GPS features of infotainment systems, and engineers are always trying to improve navigational capabilities. Connectivity means connecting the infotainment system to other devices, like mobile phones. Connectivity works both ways. Mobile phones can power apps through the infotainment system, and the infotainment system can project a Wi-Fi network for the phones.

Another major segment of the industry is the display segment. Every company wants to make its infotainment system look better and be more user-friendly.

Global Growth of Automotive Infotainment

When you’re hiring engineers, it’s helpful to be aware of the global market. This helps you talk knowledgeably to engineers during interviews. By 2021, the global automotive infotainment market is projected to be worth an estimated $56.7 billion. That represents a compound annual growth rate of 8.4 percent from 2016 to 2021.

Why is the market growing so fast? Consumers are more aware of connected car offerings, and governments are more concerned about driver security. An increase in vehicle production in the Asia-Pacific region is another factor affecting growth.

Requirements for Infotainment Engineers

Now that you know more about the global automotive infotainment industry, you’re one step closer to hiring engineers. You also need to know the skills engineers need to be successful in this industry, however. If you’re not an engineer yourself, you may not know what you’re supposed to be looking for or what you should write in the job description.

Like other engineering workers you’ve procured, infotainment engineers will need a post-secondary degree. This degree should be in software engineering, computer science, or a related field.

Candidates should also have knowledge of UI framework and Android UI framework. They should have experience working with ActionScript, Qt, or HTML5. They should also have experience in some of the infotainment industry’s market segments. This includes navigation, speech recognition, hands-free processing, internet apps, or cybersecurity.

Soft skills are also essential for infotainment engineers. They need excellent communication skills to work with the rest of the team and with external suppliers. They need above-average problem-solving skills to identify issues with the infotainment systems and to come up with solutions. They also need to have a strong work ethic so the infotainment projects can be completed on schedule.

Where to Find Infotainment Engineers

Since infotainment engineers are in high demand, they can be difficult to find, and you need an essential guide to hiring engineers. The best engineers are probably already working for other companies and may not be checking online job boards. Eighty-five percent of employed workers are open to new job opportunities, so don’t be afraid to go looking for these candidates.

Networking is one place to start. For example, you could meet candidates through events hosted by one of Canada’s engineering associations. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers holds three conferences a year, and you could meet talented engineers at these conferences.

You can also ask your company’s current infotainment employees to refer candidates. They may know talented people in the industry who are open to a new job. Offer a reward, like a cash bonus, to encourage good referrals.

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Hire Skilled Developers with the Help of IT Recruiting Companies

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Sometimes, it can feel like all the great developers are hiding. When you post a job ad, you get swamped with resumes from unqualified applicants. If you receive a promising application, the candidate may perform poorly in the interview. It can feel impossible to hire the talented developers you need for your team. You need an essential guide to hiring engineers.

Surely, there must be an easier way, you say. Fortunately, there is! The secret is to get help from IT recruiting companies. Here’s how IT recruiting companies can help you solve your talent woes.

They Understand What You Need

General staffing agencies may not understand what developers do or where to look for developers. IT recruiting companies specialize in filling these types of technical roles. They have a firm understanding of the intricacies of recruiting for developer roles. They already know what experience and education candidates should have, and they understand all the technical jargon developers use.

Since these companies have a firm understanding of what developers do, they can help you narrow down what you’re looking for. It can be difficult to articulate what you’re looking for in your new employees. IT recruiting companies know which questions to ask to determine exactly what candidates you’re looking for.

For example, you may have a hard time describing the types of candidates who’d fit in well with your company’s culture. Cultural fit is just as important as technical skills, if not more so. Is your ideal candidate a team player or an independent worker? Is your ideal candidate poised to be an IT leader someday? Are you looking for an innovative thinker to match the rest of your team? By asking these types of questions, recruiting companies can help you understand who you need to hire.

They Can Find Candidates You Can’t

Good developers are difficult for you to find on your own, as you’ve discovered. Since developers are in high demand, the good ones are probably already employed somewhere else. Employed developers may not be browsing job boards, so they won’t see your ads.

While your ideal candidates may not be actively looking for new jobs, they can be lured away from their current employers. Only 15 percent of employed professionals are completely satisfied with their jobs and unwilling to move on; the rest are open to new work. Recruiters are experts at locating these passive candidates and talking to them about possible opportunities. Recruiters know how to make your open positions seem interesting, so they can get candidates to talk. They also know what you need to offer in order to appeal to these talented developers.

It’s hard for you to do this on your own. Even if you can find talented workers at your competitors’ companies, they may not want to talk to you. However, they can trust recruiters to be discreet and not jeopardize their current jobs.

They Have Expert Interviewing Skills

Interviewing is just a tiny part of your job. As an IT director, you have many more important tasks to worry about on a day-to-day basis. You don’t have time to refine your interviewing skills.

Recruiters are experts in interviewing. They do it every day, so they know how to assess candidates. They have the expertise to ask questions you wouldn’t have thought of. They can ask questions to determine candidates’ cultural fit and soft skills. This ensures the candidates will be a good fit for your team.

Let’s say you want to hire a developer with excellent problem-solving skills. Applicants may say they solve problems well on their resumes, but that might not be true. Recruiters know what questions to ask to find out if candidates actually have these skills. For example, they could ask candidates to describe problems they’ve solved without help. They could ask candidates to describe situations where they couldn’t solve certain problems and needed the manager’s help. They could even have candidates solve a problem during the interview.

When you need to hire skilled developers, seek expert help from a technical recruitment company.

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Overwhelmed by Recruiting Engineers? Follow These 5 Tips

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Do you wish you had a guide to hiring engineers? In this competitive market, recruiting engineers can be challenging. The best engineers are fielding offers from multiple companies, and companies need to compete to hire top talent.

How can you attract talented engineers to your team while taking the stress out of the recruitment process? Here are five tips for recruiting engineers.

1. Encourage Employee Referrals

If you don’t already have one, start an employee referral program. Your current employees probably know other people in the engineering field. They can refer talented candidates to your company. Employee referrals give you access to better candidates. This is because your employees are familiar with the company and know what types of people would succeed on the team.

To encourage your employees to refer candidates, offer incentives. Incentives don’t have to be financial, though they can be. Publicly recognizing employee referrals or offering positive feedback can also motivate employees to make good referrals.

2. Advertise Your Company Culture

Engineers are in high demand in the labour market, so they can afford to be picky. They consider factors other than salary and benefits, like company culture. Company culture refers to the environment in the workplace, which includes the company’s values and practices.

To attract engineers to your company, advertise its culture. When you write job postings, include a few specific points about the culture you’ve created in your workplace. Your current employees can also help. Employees will tell people they know about the culture, and their comments may attract candidates who find the culture appealing.

3. Write Clear Job Postings

To attract top talent, companies need to write clear job postings. If your job postings don’t clearly communicate what the job is and what the expectations are, you’ll have trouble attracting good candidates. Poor candidates may misunderstand the posting and send an application. Good candidates may not want to waste time applying for a job they may not be interested in.

Postings should list all the essential functions the engineer will need to perform. Clearly list skills candidates should have, and specify whether each skill is mandatory or just preferred. Give details about the company culture. Don’t forget to mention whether the job is part time or full time, and whether or not the position is permanent.

4. Have a Long-Term Recruiting Strategy

Do you only think about hiring when you have an immediate need for new engineers? This approach can make it harder to find the top talent you need. Your hiring timelines won’t always match up with the timelines of top candidates. In engineering fields, candidates may want to finish up their current projects before they move to a new job. They can’t always give two weeks’ notice and move on, like candidates in other fields can.

Instead, try to play the long game. If you’re always on the hunt for new talent, you can build a network of candidates you’d like to hire. Those people may not be immediately available, but if you stay in contact, they may be available when you have a hiring need.

5. Work with a Recruiter

Recruiting engineers can be challenging, and you might decide you don’t have time to do it yourself. Or, you might just not want to deal with the hassle of recruitment. In these situations, consider partnering with a recruiter to get the engineering staff you need. Using a recruiter can save you both time and stress.

Recruiters who specialize in engineering fields can make hiring easy. They network constantly to find good engineers, so you don’t have to. They also maintain databases of engineering workers, so they can quickly find talented people to join your team.

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How to Find and Hire QA Specialists in IT

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Do you need to find and hire QA specialists for your team? These days, hiring good quality assurance workers is a big challenge. QA testers, leads, analysts, managers, engineers, auditors, and coordinators are in high demand, so it’s not enough to just post an ad on an online job board anymore. The great candidates you want to hire may already have jobs, and they may not be scanning job boards to look for new opportunities. That’s why you get swamped with unqualified applicants every time you post an ad for a tester.

If you can’t find great candidates on the job boards, where are they all hiding? Good candidates are out there; you just need to know where to look. Here are some tips for finding and hiring great QA specialists for your team.

Network with QA Professionals

Top QA specialists may not be checking job boards, but they can be reached in other ways. You can meet QA people at various networking events, including StarWEST, the longest-running conference on software quality assurance and testing, and Quality Jam, a software testing event focused on helping QA teams work smarter and faster.

You could also try a QA-specific meetup event or join an online tester community, such as UTest. The QA specialists you meet may be interested in your projects. Or, they may know someone who’d be interested in working for you.

Ask Your Team for Referrals

If you already have some QA specialists on your team, ask them for referrals. Let your team know you’re looking for some new QA talent for the team. Describe your ideal hire, and ask if the team knows anyone who fits your requirements. It’s likely your employees know other people in the industry. Their connections may be interested in new work.

To encourage your employees to refer good candidates, consider offering some type of referral bonus. The most common type of referral bonus is money, but you can use any type of recognition you think your team would like.

Attract QA Professionals with Your Culture

Your workplace culture is another way to attract QA specialists to your team. QA workers who are already employed can afford to be picky when it comes to taking new jobs. They can wait to find a company that offers an attractive workplace culture. To attract top talent, advertise the types of innovative projects you’re working on, explain how important the QA specialist’s role would be in the project, and describe the type of work they would be working on, such as whether it will be automated or manual, and the types of programs or software that are unique to your environment.

When it comes to corporate culture, quality assurance specialists are specifically interested in remote work opportunities. They also want to know whether you have a fast-moving (agile) team or whether you use different approaches to testing, such as the waterfall methodology. If these aspects are part of your culture, make sure to advertise them.

Test Candidates’ Real-World Skills

Have you ever hired someone who aced the interview but performed terribly on the job? It’s a frustrating situation. Some candidates are great at talking themselves up during interviews, but they just don’t have the skills to succeed. To filter out these unqualified candidates, make sure to test their real-world skills during interviews. One way to test a candidate’s specific skills is by using an online test called Prove It!, so you can ensure you’re choosing among qualified candidates.

Testing real-world QA skills doesn’t have to be a long or complicated process. It can be as simple as having candidates take an hour to find bugs on a popular website. Experienced testers will know where to look and will be able to quickly find bugs. They’ll be able to tell you how to recreate the problems they found.

Ian Martin Can Help You Find the Best

When it comes to hiring top QA Specialists, one thing’s for sure: You don’t need to handle all your recruiting on your own. When does it make sense to outsource? If you aren’t having any success with recruiting QA specialists, or if you just don’t have time to do it properly, it makes sense to get outside help. You can turn to a technical recruitment agency to get the help you need.

Ian Martin has experience recruiting QA and other IT professionals. We have access to an established pool of talented candidates and can find top talent for you quickly. What’s more, technical recruiters understand which types of offers will entice qualified QA professionals, so we can help make your business stand out to the best of the best.

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What’s the Best Way to Hire Technical Staff?

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Hiring can be difficult in any industry, but it’s even harder in technical fields. Professionals with technical skills are in high demand, and they have a lot of job options. After spending hours writing job postings, going through resumes, and conducting interviews that go nowhere, you may be wondering if there’s a better way. This essential guide to hiring engineers is a good start, but what’s the best way to hire technical staff for your team?

Many companies turn to technical recruiting agencies when they need to hire technical staff. Here are some reasons why this is the most efficient and cost-effective way to get the technical staff you need.

Access to Passive Candidates

Since people with technical skills are in such high demand, a lot of them are already employed. They may not be actively looking for new work. However, if the right job opportunity comes along, they may be interested in leaving their current employers. These candidates are known as passive candidates. If you post ads on job boards, these professionals will never see them, since they’re not looking.

It’s hard for you to recruit passive candidates on your own. But when you work with a technical recruiting agency, you don’t need to go looking for them. The company’s recruiters will work their extensive networks to find top-quality technical workers who are open to new opportunities.

Help Narrowing down Your Search

To find the right technical staff for your team, you need to know exactly what you’re looking for. If you don’t have clear expectations of applicants, your job descriptions will be poor. Vague, generic postings aren’t clear enough to attract the right candidates. These postings confuse good candidates and keep them from applying.

One of the advantages of working with a recruiter is having the help required to narrow down what you’re looking for. Recruiters ask the right questions to help you determine exactly what you want from a new employee. This goes beyond just technical skills—they can also help you determine what soft skills a candidate needs to have to succeed as well as what personality is required to fit into your culture. With this information, it’s easier for you to find the perfect candidates.

Hire Technical Staff Faster

As a manager or director, hiring technical staff for your team is only a small part of your job. You still need to handle all your other responsibilities, like planning projects and managing your existing team. Hiring is something that you need to squeeze in to your schedule.

Since hiring isn’t your main priority, it can take a long time. You may put off tasks like reading resumes or conducting interviews because you’re too busy. Before you know it, your open positions have been vacant for a long time.

This doesn’t happen when you work with a technical recruiting agency. You can focus on your regular job, and the recruiters will look for technical staff for your team. The recruiters will pre-qualify candidates. All you need to do is choose which of the qualified candidates you want to hire.

Hire with Confidence

Sometimes, technical workers perform well in the interview, but don’t do as well in the job. They may have oversold their skills during the interview, or they may just not get along with your existing team. After spending a lot of time finding someone you thought was perfect, you may not have time to start over. This is how companies get stuck with bad hires.

When you work with a technical recruiting agency, you won’t get stuck with any bad hires. In the unlikely event that your new hire doesn’t work out, you can ask the agency to find you someone else. This eliminates your risk of getting stuck with a technical employee who isn’t a good asset for your team.

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How to Make Your Technical Recruitment More Efficient

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Are you having trouble hiring technical employees for your team? You may need to speed up your hiring process. Since technical employees are in high demand, they may be interviewing with multiple companies at the same time. If your competitors make job offers before you do, you may miss out on promising candidates.

It takes an average of 42 days for companies to fill a given position, according to a 2016 survey. Posting job ads, reading resumes, interviewing candidates, and conducting background checks takes a long time.

How can you speed up your process and scoop up top talent before your competitors get to them first? Here are some tips to make your technical recruitment process more efficient.

Build a Network of Candidates

You don’t need to start from scratch every time you need to fill an open position. Posting a new job ad and sifting through a brand-new batch of resumes is inefficient. To speed up your process, build a network of candidates you can turn to when you have an opening. This network may include candidates you’ve interviewed in the past and liked, but weren’t able to hire at the time. It can also include promising candidates you’ve met at networking events or job fairs.

When you have an opening on your team, you can turn to the database of candidates you’ve built. Let the candidates know you have an opening on your team, and describe the position. Some of the people in your database may have found work elsewhere, but don’t let that deter you from reaching out.

Twenty-five percent of employed people are actively looking for new work, so candidates may be excited to hear from you. The other 75 percent aren’t actively looking for work, but they might be open to switching jobs if something interesting comes along. If the candidates in your network aren’t interested in your open position, they may be able to refer you to people who are.

Rely on Employee Referrals

An employee referral program lets you turn your technical team into recruiters. Your technical employees know other people in technical fields. They may have connections who would be the perfect fit for your team. Encourage your employees to refer candidates to you to speed up your hiring process.

Hiring through employee referrals is faster because the candidates are pre-vetted. Your current employees are in the best position to identify people who are qualified and a good fit for your team culture. When you receive employee referrals, you don’t need to spend time wading through unqualified applicants.

When candidates are referred by existing employees, they’re more likely to accept job offers. They already know someone on your team and are familiar with the culture. They’re also more likely to stay on your team long term due to cultural fit.

Outsource Hiring to a Recruiter

Not everyone has time to build a network of candidates and follow up with them as jobs open on the team. Your top employees may not know anyone who’s looking for work. In these situations, you may not know what to do. You need a guide to hiring engineers quickly.

The secret is to outsource technical recruitment to a recruiter. Recruiters handle the process of finding and vetting candidates. All you need to do is interview the pre-selected candidates they send you, and choose who to hire.

When you work with a recruiter, you can hire technical professionals more quickly. That’s because recruiters have a network of professionals they can turn to when a company needs to fill an open position. Recruiters are experts at technical recruitment.

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7 Tips for Hiring in the Automotive Infotainment Market

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The market for engineers is very competitive, especially in the automotive infotainment market. Every company wants talented engineers for their projects, but not every company can find them. Ninety-five percent of hiring managers say they have trouble filling open engineering positions.

If you’re struggling to find the best engineers for your infotainment team, this essential guide to hiring engineers will help put you on the right track. Here are seven tips for hiring in the very competitive automotive infotainment market.

1. Ask Your Network

As a hiring manager of engineers, you probably know a lot of people in the engineering field. Other managers at the company, past colleagues, or old classmates could know someone who’s looking for a job. They can put you in touch with talented engineers you wouldn’t have been able to find otherwise. Plus, when someone comes recommended by a person you trust, you can hire confidently.

2. Ask for Employee Referrals

Hiring through an employee referral program is an effective recruitment tool. Your existing employees can help you find talented workers for your team. As infotainment engineers, they have a lot of connections in the industry. Let your employees know you’re hiring, and tell them what type of candidates you’re looking for. They may have friends or old coworkers that would be a perfect fit for the team.

3. Write Clear Job Postings

Have you ever read a job posting and had no idea what the job entailed? Many companies write vague or generic postings that don’t give applicants much information. If you write vague postings, candidates may get confused. They won’t know what type of work they’d be doing.

The highly talented infotainment engineers you want to hire won’t waste their time trying to decipher unclear posts. Write posts that detail the day-to-day responsibilities of the position and the skills and experience needed to succeed. Be as clear and specific as possible to more easily hire engineers.

4. Branch out from Job Boards

A lack of quality applicants is one of the biggest struggles for hiring managers of engineers. After posting a job ad on an online board, you may be swamped with candidates who aren’t the right fit. After reading through all the resumes, you may not find a single person you want to interview. That’s why hiring managers should branch out. Don’t just rely on online job boards. Use other methods, like social media, to find candidates.

5. Sell the Position

Job interviews aren’t just an opportunity for you to find out if candidates are right for the job. They’re also an opportunity for candidates to find out if the job is right for them. During interviews, remember that your candidates are also evaluating you and the company. Try to find out what candidates are excited about, and try to sell them on relevant aspects of the job.

Candidates should be excited about working for you by the end of the interview. If they’re not excited, they can easily get a job somewhere else.

6. Emphasize Interesting Work

Since engineers are in high demand, they don’t need to settle for jobs that will bore them. They can search for opportunities that will be more exciting and interesting. During interviews, talk about the interesting work your infotainment team has done in the past. This gives candidates an idea of the type of work they’d be doing on a day-to-day basis if they join your team.

7. Use a Recruiting Agency

Since the market for automotive infotainment engineers is so competitive, you may still struggle with hiring after following these tips. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you need a bit of help with hiring.

A recruiting agency can hunt for talented infotainment engineers for your team. Recruiters have large networks and are experts at finding candidates for companies. In no time, they can find the perfect engineers to join your team.

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How to Recruit IT Talent and Take Control of Your Projects

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Information technology professionals are in high demand in Canada. The recruitment market is very competitive, and the labour market outlook isn’t getting any better for employers. By 2019, it’s projected that there won’t be enough homegrown IT talent to fill available jobs. Since IT professionals are in such high demand, they can choose between many job opportunities.

This is good news for people working in IT. However, it can make life difficult for managers who need to recruit IT employees. How can you recruit IT workers for your projects when the market is so competitive?

You need an essential guide to hiring engineers. Here are some tips for recruiting IT talent in this competitive market.

Use Your Company Culture

Company culture is essentially the personality of a company. Every company has a culture, even though it can sometimes be hard to identify. Company culture includes things like the company’s mission, work environment, values, and expectations. IT professionals can afford to be picky about company culture since they’re in such high demand.

As an IT manager, you don’t have much control over the overall culture of the company. However, you can make your team’s culture more attractive. Today’s employees value things like a collaborative work culture, a flexible work schedule, and a mentor-like relationship with their bosses. Highlight your strengths in these areas in your job ads to attract candidates.

Offer Interesting Challenges

Since IT professionals are in demand, they get the opportunity to choose the jobs that sound the most interesting to them. In this competitive market, there’s no reason for talented employees to be bored at work. They want to be challenged. They want to do work that’s important and that can grow their skills.

During interviews with candidates, emphasize the interesting challenges they’ll get to solve. You can also discuss some of the interesting work your team has done in the past. The opportunity to solve complicated problems and do exciting work makes your company more attractive.

Prioritize Continuous Learning

Talented IT professionals don’t want their skills to become stagnant. They want to continue learning and improving. This keeps them at the top of their field. If one job offers opportunities for continuous learning, but another doesn’t, they may choose the former. To recruit IT employees, prioritize continuous learning and professional development on your team.

Continuous learning doesn’t have to be a complicated or expensive process. It can be as simple as providing work-related reading material for employees to read during office hours. It can also include individually coaching employees to help them maximize their potential. Training programs or classes, as well as conferences and seminars, if you have the budget for them, can also be very attractive to candidates.

Make Offers Quickly

Have you ever made offers to IT candidates, only for them to say they’d already accepted other offers? As the old saying goes, “if you snooze, you lose.” Your favourite candidates could be interviewing with a few other companies at the same time. If you’re not fast enough, another company could hire them first.

When you’re sure a candidate is perfect for your team, don’t wait. Make a strong offer right away. Of course, this only applies to candidates you’re sure you want to hire. Don’t rush to make offers to mediocre candidates.

Get Help from a Recruitment Agency

If you’re struggling to recruit IT employees for your team, consider working with a technical recruitment agency. Recruitment agencies can source IT professionals for your team. Since they already have networks of professionals, they can find talented employees for your team quickly.

Recruiters can even find candidates who aren’t actively looking for new positions. These people are already employed, but they can be lured away for the right opportunity. It’s hard for managers to find these people without help.

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5 Tactics to Recruit IT Professionals with Confidence

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IT recruitment can be a perplexing process for many hiring managers. The field represents a bold new frontier for many HR professionals, and their methods are often woefully inadequate as a result. Specialists in the IT field are in high demand, so companies need to offer a clear direction and plenty of incentives to draw in top talent.

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The Complete Guide to Staffing in the Engineering Industry

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Hiring engineers is notoriously difficult. You need to find professionals with the right qualifications and skills for your projects. If you choose someone whose skills are too niche or underdeveloped, you’ll need to spend much more money to train or replace them. That’s why it’s so important for you to hire well. 

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5 Factors to Consider When Filling IT Positions

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Your IT staff is among the most important aspects of your business. These professionals maintain your systems so your operations can continue to run smoothly. Without them, your company would quickly fall into disarray, so it’s important to hire properly when the time comes.

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What Are the Benefits of Partnering with Engineering Recruiters?

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It takes a lot of work to recruit the right engineers. In general, technical projects require highly qualified workers who specialize in the right fields. Yet hiring managers can’t hire based on qualifications alone. Plenty of other factors will influence whether a new engineer will fit in at a company. 

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Technical Recruitment Made Easy: 5 Strategies to Hire Great People

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The best technical workers aren’t desperate for work. Skilled professionals are in high demand, so companies are sure to scoop up promising individuals quickly. This is great news if you’re a technician, but it’s not so encouraging for hiring managers. They need to find top talent quickly to reduce their costs, which is no easy feat when competition is fierce.

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Looking to Fill IT Positions? Keep These 5 Tips in Mind

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Modern companies need IT departments like fish need water and people need oxygen. You need an effective IT team maintaining your infrastructure in order to allow your company to grow and innovate with the tides of change. Hiring properly for these crucial rolesis a necessity, but it’s not always a simple task.

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How Recruiters Help Businesses Hire Technical Staff

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There are a handful of challenges that come with technical recruitment. It takes skill and good sense to avoid small errors that could otherwise prolong your hiring efforts and cost your organization more money. Recruiters want to take their time during the hiring procedure to make sure they hire the best candidate for the role.

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5 Reasons to Partner with Engineering Recruitment Agencies

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There’s a lot of stake when it comes to hiring engineers, which is why you want to get it right the first time to avoid expensive replacement costs and unnecessary paperwork. For most companies, this requires an extensive talent acquisition strategy and sustained recruitment efforts.

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5 Things I Wish I Knew about Engineering Recruitment Agencies

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Hiring engineers is a lot like a boxing match—in both cases, your time is limited, you’re under a lot of pressure to come out on top, and if you’re not careful, you may end up getting knocked out. It’s easy to see why anyone would need a guide to navigate these circumstances.

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How Can Technical Recruiting Agencies Help Me?

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You don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t work with technical recruiting agencies. These organizations can be a godsend if you need to hire skilled technical professionals under tight time and budgetary constraints. Consulting a qualified recruiter can help you avoid the pitfalls of hiring, especially considering those hazards can be extremely damaging to your business.

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How to Take the Stress out of Recruiting Engineers

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Behind every great engineer is a talented hiring manager. These recruitment experts understand what their companies need and find the professionals who can deliver. Both the company and the individual flourish as a result.

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4 Things You Likely Don’t Know about Engineering Recruitment Agencies

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Finding the right engineer is no walk in the park. You need to locate candidates that match your needs. Often, these professionals must possess very specific technical abilities, which leaves you with very little room for compromise. You might be able to find a skilled worker from a related field, but it’s unlikely that the worker will be able to offer the level of quality you require.

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What Does a Recruiter Do, Anyway?

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Hiring is a task that is rarely simple yet always necessary. Whether you’re looking for short-term project staffing or a permanent employee, you need to find candidates who are qualified to perform the work.

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Hiring Engineers Shouldn’t Be as Difficult as Engineering

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When people want to say that a task shouldn’t be as difficult as it is, they often exclaim, “it’s not rocket science!” Perhaps it would be more fitting if they said, “it’s not engineering.” This profession requires employees to attain distinctive skills and a complex working knowledge so they can develop new products for a variety of applications and industries. As a result, it can be difficult to find engineers who are qualified to fill these roles.

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Hiring an iOS Developer? Learn the Different Programming Languages

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Hiring can be difficult at the best of times, but it’s harder when you don’t understand the job you’re hiring for. If you need to hire an iOS developer for your team, you might not know where to start. This guide to hiring engineers is a great start.

Here are some tips for hiring an iOS developer.

Familiarize Yourself with the Required Skills

When you post an ad for an iOS developer, you’ll receive resumes that list technologies and skills you’ve never heard of. Before you can choose who you want to interview, you need to do your research and familiarize yourself with those skills.

You don’t need to become an expert in programming languages to hire an iOS developer, and you don’t need to learn how to write code or how to make your own apps. However, you do need an awareness of programming languages. To hire developers, you need to know which languages they’ll need to do the job well.

Objective-C is the primary language that developers use to write iOS applications. Swift is another language your candidates should know. This language is newer, and it builds on Objective-C. Swift has many advantages over Objective-C: it’s easier to maintain, safer, and faster. Due to these advantages, Swift may completely replace Objective-C in the future, so your candidates should know this language. Developers can command a higher salary when they know Swift, so keep that in mind.

Candidates should also know how to use XCode. While not a programming language, this tool is essential for programming apps. XCode is the tool developers use to code, test, and debug their apps.

Pay Attention to Soft Skills

To be successful, an iOS developer needs to be experienced in programming languages. However, knowing programming languages alone isn’t enough to be a good developer. Developers also need to have the right mix of soft skills. When you’re screening candidates, make sure to look for soft skills.

Critical thinking is a crucial soft skill for developers since they’ll be solving complicated problems. Candidates also must be curious and willing to actively seek out new knowledge. Programming is always changing—the Swift language has only been around for a couple years—and candidates need to be continuously learning to keep up.

Don’t Interview Candidates Alone

Sorting through resumes is only one part of the hiring process. You also need to interview candidates. Interviewing developers when you’re not a developer can be challenging. You may not know which questions to ask to learn more about their technical skills and experience.

Panel interviews can help overcome this problem. If you already have a developer on your team, ask that employee to sit in on the interview. The developer can ask technical questions that you won’t know to ask. As an expert, the developer will be able to evaluate candidates’ answers and let you know how well they performed.

Get Help from a Recruiter

You might not have the time to familiarize yourself with the various programming languages or learn which soft skills are essential for developers. You might not have anyone who can sit in on interviews with you. These obstacles don’t mean that you have to blindly hire a developer and hope for the best. You can get help from a recruiting agency.

Look for a recruiting agency that specializes in filling technical roles, like iOS developers. Recruiters at these agencies have a lot of experience finding talented developers for companies. Since they recruit developers all the time, they already know which programming languages are essential. They will only pass on talented candidates.

When you work with a recruiter, you don’t need to spend time familiarizing yourself with programming languages. You can get back to what’s important – planning and executing your projects. The recruiter will handle the hiring process, and you’ll get a talented iOS developer for your team.

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5 Interview Questions to Tell Good Job Candidates from Great Ones

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Interviews aren’t just nerve-wracking for job candidates—hiring managers face intense pressure to recruit top talent and cut any undesirable applicants loose. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to distinguish a great prospect from amediocre one. Managers only have a few tests and interviews to determine whether a potential employee will be a long-term asset. If they make the wrong decision, they may saddle their organization with a subpar worker.

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3 Things You Didn’t Know about Engineering Recruitment Agencies

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A prolonged hiring process doesn’t benefit anyone. Candidates have to walk on eggshells waiting for your call, and many will take other jobs if they don’t hear from you quickly. Your company will also lose money and may even suffer from reduced productivity until you’re fully staffed again, which can put substantial pressure on hiring managers. This is why many turn to recruitment agencies to speed up the process.

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4 Little-Known Ways Technical Recruiters Will Help You Hire Better

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How Contract Staffing Works

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If you need to hire, you need to plan for all outcomes. Even if your team seems to be meeting its goals, sudden interruption can throw entire projects into disarray. In these instances, it’s your job to supply the manpower necessary to complete these tasks on time and on budget. This can place significant constraints on your performance, and you may start to feel additional stress and pressure as a result.

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How to Find the Ideal Job Candidate for Your Upcoming Project

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Project staffing can sometimes feel similar to fortune telling. You have to predict which applicant will perform best in a role without seeing their skills in action. Unless you actually do have a crystal ball, this can be a nerve-wracking process. Sure, someone may look great on paper, but who’s to say whether they can actually follow through on their potential after you’ve hired them.

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The Ultimate How-To Guide for Technical Recruitment

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It’s difficult enough for hiring managers to fill a regular position. The planning and work needed to source, interview, and hire a viable employee is enormous. But staffing projects with technical workers can be even more difficult, as many of the same problems still apply. You have to find an independent contractor whose skills match your project’s requirements, and you often have to do so in a shorter period.

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What Will I Gain by Working with Recruiters?

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A new hire has the opportunity to benefit or harm your company. A great employee will fit your company’s immediate needs and grow into new roles over time. On the other hand, an unsatisfactory worker will require more resources and incur greater costs.

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How to Write an Effective Job Ad

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Wish You Could Hire Engineers?

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Do you want to hire a skilled, diligent engineer? Good luck. Your search will likely require a great deal of time and resources. After all, start-ups usually spend an average of about 80 hours sourcing and recruiting just one engineer. Your projects will suffer if you don’t recruit the right personnel, but can you really afford to spend two working weeks finding and hiring one person?

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5 Things an Engineering Recruitment Company Will Do (That You Won’t)

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Partnering with an engineering recruitment company means getting a knowledgeable and experienced team to help you with things you might not necessarily be able to do on your own. Engineering recruitment companies make it their job to take on tasks that you often don’t have the time or resources for. Here are five things an engineering recruitment company will do that you won’t:

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5 Ways You’ll Win with an Engineering Recruitment Partner

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Hiring is an exciting time for an engineering company. Stressful too, but you are about to hire new employees who will bring in creative energy and ideas to help your company grow. Having a winning strategy for hiring is important. If you partner with an engineering recruitment firm, here are five ways you’ll win:

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The hiring process can be incredibly stressful and time consuming. From beginning to end, it requires a lot of energy and work to find the right people and to make sure that they’re able to transition into their new positions. When you partner with engineering recruiters, you’re putting yourself in the hands of highly experienced people who can help you streamline the whole process.

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5 Benefits of Using Contract Staff in the Oil and Gas Industry

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Contract staff can be a great solution to many of the hiring problems facing the oil and gas industry, a field that requires a highly specialized skill set and knowledge. Here are five benefits of using contract staff in the oil and gas industry.

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What’s the Best Day of the Week to Post a Job Ad?

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Job ads are an integral part of the hiring process, and an exciting first step in the task of finding employees that will enrich your business. The success of your job ad depends on numerous things, and one of these things is when you post the ad. Posting your job ad at the right time is crucial; there are tons of job advertisements being posted all the time, and posting yours when people are less likely to see it means it could quickly find its way to the bottom of the search results.

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Hiring is one of those rare practices that never gets any easier, even if you do it a lot. Managers have to choose the best candidate for a task with which they may be unfamiliar, and recruitment methods change with every passing year. Time and resource constraints can amplify these problems and make them seem insurmountable.

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Hiring Managers’ Top Secrets Revealed

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Hiring managers are the secret MVPs at nearly every organization. They seek out the most qualified candidates for every posting and pluck the best matches from the pack like they’re drawing a needle from a haystack. While these professionals make hiring look easy, their job is tricky and intricate. They have to sense how an employee will suit their company and which skills should take priority.

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What to Look For in Staffing Agencies

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Staffing agencies can be a great resource to find workers to help fill positions and contribute positively to the success of your workplace. They’re also becoming increasingly common partners across various industries; it’s believed that by 2020, 40% of the workforce will be made up of contract workers supplied by staffing agencies. Companies also largely benefit from staffing agencies; the American Staffing Association found that 41% of companies that use agencies access more candidates with top talent. Here are some of the things you should look for as you begin seeking an agency that’s the right fit for your business.

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4 Hiring Tips from an Engineering Recruiter

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Recruitment can be tough in any industry, but when you’re looking to hire an engineer, the competition can be incredibly fierce. Since engineers are in such high demand right now, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of your recruiting game and pay attention to tips and tricks directly from the experts.

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Can an Engineering Recruitment Company Really Help Me?

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No matter what type of engineer you need, hiring can leave you feeling stressed out and overwhelmed by the task. Your new addition needs to have specific abilities to complete and succeed at all of the projects your organization undertakes. Finding these skilled workers can be a difficult task, though,especially when you have time and budget constraints. If you don’t hire properly, you may get saddled with a subpar worker who can’t pull his or her weight. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of the hiring process without having to spend time and resources you don’t have?

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Why Partner with an Engineering Recruitment Company?

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Hiring the right engineers is crucial to your short- and long-term success. All members of your team need to work at their highest capacities, especially when you’re up against tight deadlines and restrictive budgets. Yet finding top talent is often harder than you might expect. Engineers are in high demand, and other firms may scoop up the most promising candidates before you get the chance. Is there any way to hire efficiently in this environment?

Fortunately, there is. The right engineering recruitment company can take the stress out of your hiring process. These companies offer a range of services that can help you find your company’s next great technical professional. Whether you need a temporary solution or a long-term fix, a qualified recruiter will give your staffing search the boost it needs.

Still unconvinced? This article will list just a few of the benefits an engineering recruitment company can offer you. Read on to find out everything you need to know about these dynamic firms.

They Understand Your Industry

Nobody understands your company like you do. You know your organization’s unique strengths and constraints, which gives you insight into the personnel you need. How can another company match this expertise?

The staff at engineering recruitment firms may not know everything about your company, but they do understand your industry. These professionals work with clients in many different fields, so they need to keep up to date on industry trends and adapt to suit different interests. If they don’t already know how your organization fits within your industry, they’ll learn quickly so they can find engineers who are suited to your needs.

They Hire Faster

Time is money during your hiring period. Companies often need to pay to source candidates and access recruitment resources. Vacant positions can also cause operational inefficiencies that compromise output and reduce profits. You can’t hire slowly if you want to staunch these financial losses.

Thankfully, time isn’t an issue when you work with an engineering recruitment company. One of the advantages of working with recruiters is that you’ll be able to draw candidates from pre-established networks, which cuts down on sourcing and vetting time. As a result, you can interview these professionals quickly and hire them before your expenses get out of hand.

They Can Help You Reach Passive Candidates

Passive candidates are like unicorns to hiring managers. These professionals represent the top talent in an industry, but they usually don’t search actively for new employment. They’re rare and yet highly sought after, so you need some way to distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Engineering recruiters make this task a breeze. They go to great lengths to find passive candidates and network with them, which helps them build connections that many firms can’t achieve on their own. If your interests align with passive candidates, a recruiter can connect you and facilitate a hire. You’ll gain an unbeatable employee who never would’ve considered your position otherwise, and you’ll have a recruiter to thank for this success.

They Cost Less

It’s hard to hire effectively from within the confines of a tight budget. Attracting the right employee means offering competitive salaries and benefits, all of which can cut through a bottom line like a knife through butter. Spend too much and you’ll incur the wrath of your bosses. Spend too little and you’ll alienate applicants. What do you do?

In this case, the simple answer is to engage a recruitment agency. These firms don’t just find better candidates—they also minimize unnecessary hiring expenses and work within established budgets. You can be cost conscious and still find a great engineer if you work with the right recruiting firm.

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5 Strategies to Improve Your Technical Recruitment

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The success of your projects depends on the skills of your staff. If your engineers don’t have the proper skills or the right knowledge to get the job done, then you may be setting yourself up for failure. As in some cases, perhaps your firm can’t afford to hire workers who possess all of the abilities you need for any given project, so you’re likely to be caught flatfooted at some point.

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Finding and hiring engineers has never been easy, but with the advent of technology in the workplace, it’s grown even harder to find top talent for your business. The technology market is evolving at an incredibly rapid pace, making it more important than ever to stay on top of the hiring process and keep your engineering recruiting skills up to date.

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How to Sharpen Your Staffing Process

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The Best Practices for IT Staffing

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Finding strong, skilled IT applicants can be a stressful job. The IT department is an integral part of any workforce, so a lot relies on building a solid and talented team of IT professionals. As you go about IT staffing, it’s important to make sure you are in contact with the best candidates, and that you’re able to acquire the best people possible to fill the necessary positions. Luckily, we are here to tell you some of the best practices for IT staffing.

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Try These 3 Quick Tips to Streamline Your Technical Recruitment

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You’re probably spending a lot of time and money to recruit new contractors. Each stage in the process means further expenditure, but you still can’t skip out on any steps. First you need to advertise a job or you won’t get any skilled applicants, then the interviewing procedure requires you to weed out poor candidates, verify your prospects’ achievements and qualifications, and more. When hiring for your team, you can’t rush the job—but the longer it takes, the more resources are lost.

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4 Simple Tips to Take Your Project Staffing to the Next Level

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How You Can (and Should) Work with Your Contractors More Efficiently

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Working with contractors gives you benefits that full-time staffers cannot match: if you’ve finished one project and are gearing up for another, you can add or subtract workers to prioritize the abilities you need. Contract employees generally come to the table with plenty of experience in many different areas, and you don’t have to lose an arm and a leg in hiring costs. As a result, an effective team of contractors can save your company a wealth of time and resources, allowing you to do more with less hassle.

But while these hired hands represent a versatile solution for many projects, you still need to get them to perform at their peak. This requires effort that may not be readily apparent when you first sign them on. If you follow through, however, your contractors are sure to deliver impressive results. Read on to learn three helpful tips that will maximize your contractors’ efficiency.

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Building Culture with Contractors

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We certainly talk about company “culture” a lot, but how do you define it? If you have contractors on your team, how do you develop it?  Though their relationship to the company might be different than that of a full-time employee, developing a positive team or company culture with contractors benefits both you and them.

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Contract staffing – where do I begin?

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Contract staffing, consulting, freelancing … once you’ve determined what to call it, how do you begin with contract staffing?

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Why should I use contract staff?

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From lawyers and business people to writers, designers and yoga instructors – it seems that in today’s “part-time economy”, nearly everyone has branded themselves as a “consultant.”

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4 tips for optimizing IT recruitment

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Onboarding the right Infrastructure and Operations personnel is a critical component of IT staffing, as the quality of I&O staff can be an important competitive differentiator for companies, according to John Rivard, research director for Infrastructure and Operations at Gartner. As outlined in a piece for CIO.com by Sharon Florentine, Rivard presented a robust IT recruitment and retention strategy that companies should follow if they want to enjoy the benefits of having top talent within their organizations.

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