Do Candidates Really Care About Corporate Social Responsibility?

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You’ve found a strong candidate. The interview is going well. You’ve told them about your company’s impressive benefits package, highlighted the opportunities for growth and development within the position, and shared some of the things your company does to support work-life balance. As you go through your mental checklist of all the factors that could positively influence the candidate’s decision to join your team, you feel like you’ve checked all the boxes. But has your pitch included some evidence that your company is committed to improving the lives of people and the health of our planet? If not, there’s a 50% chance that great candidate is going to walk out the door at the end of the interview and never look back.

According to research, your company’s commitment to corporate responsibility has a direct tie to attracting and retaining talent that may be even stronger than you realize: 

  • 58% of candidates surveyed said they consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work. 
  • 55% said they would choose to work for a socially responsible company, even if the salary was less. 
  • 51% said they will not work for a company that doesn’t have strong social or environmental commitments.

Highlighting corporate social responsibility is even more critical if you’re trying to convince a candidate that is between the ages of 27 and 35 to join your team.  

  • 67% of this mature Millennial segment surveyed in the study said they would not work for a company that did not have strong corporate responsibility commitments.  
  • 76% of mature Millennials said they would choose to work for a socially responsible company, even if the salary would be less than at other companies. 

Ian Martin employees volunteer during our annual B Corp Day in the local community.

Convincing candidates that your company is committed to making the world a better place isn’t as simple as pointing out your recycling bins and sharing some impressive figures from your charitable donation programs. Today’s candidates are wary of corporate greenwashing, so be prepared to share some hard data to prove that your company walks the walk when it comes to its social and environmental efforts. 

One way that for-profit companies can prove without a doubt that they follow rigorous standards related to their social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency is to acquire B Corp certification. While the certification process will involve time and effort, it will set your company apart as an organization that is not only competing to be the best IN the world, but also to be the best FOR the world. Joining the roster of over 2,400 other Certified B Corps including recognizable names like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, and Etsy won’t hurt your recruitment efforts either! You can learn more about the additional practical business benefits that Ian Martin has experienced as a result of our own B Corp certification here. 

Since research suggests that 78% of employees want to be an active participant in helping their company improve its responsible business practices, the corporate responsibility case you present to the candidate shouldn’t focus solely on big-picture initiatives and results. Share examples of the processes and programs you have in place that allow employees to get personally involved in your company’s charitable and environmental efforts. Today, the priority that employees place on opportunities to personally support causes or issues they care about is on par with benefits like wellness programs and tuition reimbursement. If you have a community volunteering or pro bono program, share data to give candidates a better sense of how many employees currently participate. Encourage current employees to share their volunteer experiences on your company’s social media channels. This will allow candidates to see real-life examples of your commitment to your community when they are conducting pre- and post-interview research.

In today’s raging war for technical talent, employers should leave no stone unturned when it comes to convincing candidates why their company is a great place to work. Our Insider’s Guide to Technical Recruitment has some helpful tips to assist you in assessing your company like a prospective employee. If you would like to get additional insight into the types of questions that candidates may have about your company’s corporate social responsibility efforts, connect with one of our Ian Martin Hiring Consultants. 

Recruiters Off the Clock: Is Checking References Officially Extinct?

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They spend hours rounding up recruits, scoping out search assignments, consulting with their clients, and negotiating job offers. At the end of a long day, they’re ready to dish and we make sure we’re on hand to capture their very best insights to share in our Recruiters Off the Clock blog series. 

The Question:

Does anyone actually check references anymore?

 

The Recruiters:  

Joanna Mamo 

Joanna has worked in technical recruitment for over 15 years. She has been helping candidates find meaningful work in a variety of technology sectors with Ian Martin Group clients since 2008.   

 

 

Ratheesh Manivannan 

Ratheesh has worked in the field of technical recruitment since 2012 and for Ian Martin since 2015. He is passionate about matching talented people with engaging roles to create long-term satisfaction for both company and candidate.  

 

 

Nadiya Khan 

Nadiya has extensive experience as a technical recruiter and has been specifically focused on the engineering, telecom and IT sectors since she joined Ian Martin in 2015. 

 

 

The Dish: 

“Absolutely! Not only do my clients want to see references, some request references from specific companies that appear on the candidate’s resume.  Some employers are also asking to see references sooner in the process. Traditionally, collecting references was often one of the last things to occur before an offer, but some employers are requesting reference checks now prior to a second interview. Having a robust set of references is still a very important element of the job search.”

Joanna Mamo, Senior Technical Recruiter 

 

“Social media has made it easier for employers to get a better sense of the backgrounds of candidates, but it’s a mistake to think it has become a replacement for reference checks. Sites like LinkedIn can’t be verified for true authenticity, so employers will take a look, but they may still want to verify that those accolades posted on your profile are consistent with what your actual employers have to say about your past performance. As there is a good chance they’ll be doing a social media search, candidates should be giving any public social media pages a really thorough review regularly. Even if you have privacy settings set up so only friends of friends can see your page, you’d be surprised how connected the world is. Make sure there’s nothing posted on your social media pages that you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see.”

Ratheesh Manivannan, Staffing Specialist 

 

“Not every single employer asks me to call references, but candidates need to be prepared for that. One huge mistake I see candidates make when we do contact references is they give us the name and number of their reference, but forget to give the reference a heads up that we might be calling. It’s not only inconsiderate to the reference, it can really result in subpar comments because the person may not portray the candidate in the best light when they haven’t had time to think about their answer in advance.”

Nadiya Khan, Recruitment Manager 

Happiness at Work Benefits the Brain AND the Bottom Line

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Not that long ago, if you’d asked the world’s political and business leaders about the role of happiness in the global economy, you probably would have been told that happiness was a pursuit for birthday parties, not boardrooms. That sentiment has changed drastically in the last decade. In 2011, recognizing that progress shouldn’t be measured by economic growth alone, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing happiness as a “fundamental human goal” and calling for “a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes the happiness and well-being of all peoples.”

Each year on March 20th, the United Nations celebrates International Day of Happiness to help raise awareness about the importance of happiness in the lives of people across the world.

A World Happiness Report is released by the United Nations each year on International Day of Happiness and findings from the 2017 report suggest that there is a vital relationship between work and happiness. While having a job has been proven to make people happier, the equation goes beyond that. Happier employees are also more likely to come to work, be more productive, take fewer sick days and are less likely to quit. Talk about a win-win!

While ultimately every person is responsible for their own happiness, research findings in the report point to specific areas that employers can support to create an environment that encourages happiness.

Work-Life Balance

Being able to achieve a healthy balance between commitments at work and home appears to be one of the most important drivers of an individual’s sense of wellbeing. Those with jobs that leave them too tired at the end of their workday to enjoy the non-work side of life report day-to-day happiness levels that are substantially lower. Workers who report that their job interferes with their ability to spend time with loved ones, and employees who feel they must “bring their job home with them,” report lower levels of subjective wellbeing.

Variety

The report’s findings suggest that people with jobs that allow them to do different things and learn new things experience more positive emotions on a day-to-day basis. The desire to learn new things on the job seems to be particularly important to millennials, who in a different study ranked training and development as their most valued employee benefit at a whopping 300 per cent higher rating than cash bonuses! Read this blog post for some suggestions to help create a culture of continuous learning and professional development.

Autonomy

An employee’s degree of autonomy at work, including having control over how their workday is organized and the pace at which they work, is another important driver of happiness in the workplace according to the 2017 World Happiness Report. This finding is echoed by some interesting research from the University of Birmingham. The research compiled two years’ worth of data from 20,000 employees and found that the higher level of autonomy a worker experienced, the higher their sense of job satisfaction and wellbeing. The type of autonomy most appreciated tended to differ by gender. Women placed a higher value on autonomy related to scheduling and location flexibility. Men appreciating autonomy more related to task allocation and pace of work.

A Circle of Support

According to the report, the support one receives from his or her co-workers also has an impact on workplace wellbeing and happiness. This finding aligns with research at Harvard that found that students with strong social support, both at school and at home, tended to be happier and better at dealing with stress. Workers with strong relationships with co-workers are also better at remaining engaged and coping with stress.

What does this all mean for recruitment?

As awareness grows about the significance of happiness in our personal and professional lives, it’s important for employers to realize that the days of relying on salary and bonuses to win over employees are long gone. The growing popularity of university courses dedicated to the topic of achieving happiness in life speaks to the priority tomorrow’s job seekers will be placing on achieving it in their careers. Yale University introduced a new course in January 2018 called, Psychology and the Good Life. The course’s goal is to help students figure out what it means to live happier, more satisfying lives, and teach them scientifically-tested strategies to achieve that goal. A quarter of the school’s undergraduate population enrolled, making it the most popular course ever at the university. At Stanford, one in six undergraduates take a course that promises to teach them to apply design thinking to the challenge of creating fulfilling lives and careers.

Action For Happiness has developed 10 Keys to Happier Living that are based on an extensive study of the latest findings from the science of wellbeing. While these keys weren’t developed specifically for the workplace, reviewing them and finding examples of ways they are demonstrated within your organization can assist in creating talking points that illustrate your company’s commitment to promoting happiness in the workplace with potential employees.

Key #1: Giving – In what ways does your workplace help others? Corporate donations, workplace fundraising for charities and volunteer programs are great examples.

Key #2: Relating – How does your organization strengthen relationships and build networks between employees? Are there corporate retreats, teambuilding events, or meetings that encourage open conversation between employees that you can speak to?

Key #3: Exercise – What things does your company do to encourage employees to be more active each day? This doesn’t have to mean investing in an onsite gym or subsidized gym memberships. Simple things like having bike racks for employees who want to cycle to work or helping clean up nearby walking trails send a message that you support employees having an active lifestyle.

Key #4: Awareness – Does your workplace do anything to promote employee mindfulness? Offering a lunchtime meditation class or even a dedicated quiet space that employees can retreat to when they need some time to collect their thoughts are great examples of how the workplace can support employee mindfulness.

Key #5: Trying Out – What channels does your company have in place to encourage employees to try different things and learn new skills? In addition to formal training and educational assistance, this could be things like casual “Lunch and Learn” sessions or encouraging the use of free online learning tools.

Key #6: Direction – How does your company assist employees to set challenging, yet achievable goals of their own and also ensure they understand their role in helping the company achieve its larger goals? Is this something that has been formalized in your performance review process?

Key #7: Resilience – All employees will be faced with stressful situations at some point. Does your company offer tools or services to help them cope with and bounce back from adversity? Mentoring programs as well as coaching or therapy offered through a company benefits program are potential supports you can showcase.

Key #8: Emotions – What processes does your company have in place to encourage the cultivation of positive emotions like joy, gratitude, contentment, inspiration, and pride at work? Things like recognition programs and sharing employee stories through internal communication channels are great examples.

Key #9: Acceptance – Does your company make an effort to promote conversations that help employees accept themselves and their colleagues as they are? Perhaps there are community initiatives that your company supports that are helping youth to accept themselves as well.

Key #10: Meaning – Is there a connection between the work that you ask employees do each day and a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives? Initiatives like workplace volunteer and mentoring programs can help provide a sense of meaning at work, especially for employees that may lack a direct line to a sense of something larger in their everyday roles.

How can we help?

Ian Martin’s Hiring Consultants gather insights every day from our candidates about the organizational values that are of particular importance them. If you’d like some suggestions as to how your company can illustrate its commitment to employee happiness and wellbeing in a more effective way, contact us today for a complimentary assessment of a recent job posting.

 

 

Lost in Translation: Level Setting Language Proficiency

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There is no doubt that bilingual and multilingual candidates are in high demand in today’s competitive market for technical talent. Unfortunately, both companies and candidates can struggle when it comes to bilingual job opportunities because of unclear expectations around language proficiency.

If you’d like your company to have improved access to today’s top talent with second-language skills, here are three simple things you can do to create better bilingual connections with potential candidates.

Assess the role’s actual second-language requirements before creating the job posting

Not every bilingual position requires complete second-language proficiency. Truly understanding the level of second-language fluency required is key. To do this, start by breaking down the daily tasks that the successful candidate will be expected to perform. This will shed light on the actual level of proficiency that is required, and in some cases, this may significantly expand the talent pool. For example, a customer service representative for a French speaking call centre may only need enough conversational English to conduct occasional face-to-face status updates with an English manager. That requires a significantly lower level of proficiency than a position where the employee must produce detailed written reports in their second language.

If a similar position is already filled with a bilingual employee, ask for their input on the level of fluency that they feel is required to do the job well.

Once you have the list of daily tasks compiled, take the time to understand which of those functions will require the candidate to speak, comprehend, and write in their second language.

Clearly communicate the position’s specific language proficiency requirements

Through conversations with thousands of candidates over the years, we know that there are many job seekers with a solid command of a second language who won’t even consider bilingual positions because they assume there is a requirement to speak, understand, and write both languages as proficiently as a native speaker. If your position does not require complete second language proficiency, you’ll gain access to a much larger pool of talent if that is communicated effectively in the job posting.

First, be clear about the specific languages you’re referencing. In a bilingual country like Canada, it’s easy to assume that the term bilingual refers to English and French, but in today’s increasingly global marketplace that’s no longer a safe assumption.

Next, look to the daily task list developed before creating the job posting to get really specific about the requirements for the second language. The posting should immediately address questions such as:

  • Is second language proficiency an asset or a requirement?
  • Will the candidate need to speak and write the second language?

Broad descriptors like “Intermediate Level of Fluency” or “Fluently Bilingual” lack clarity and can create confusion amongst potential candidates that might scare them away. Instead, paint a clear picture of language expectations by specifying second language requirements by oral, written, and reading skill proficiency.

The proficiency definitions used in Global Affairs Canada’s Language Proficiency Scale are a helpful resource that can be used to further define position requirements. The scale offers detailed definitions for its five levels of language proficiency:

  • Zero: No Language Proficiency
  • One: Elementary Proficiency
  • Two: Limited Working Proficiency
  • Three: General Professional Proficiency
  • Four: Advanced Professional Proficiency
  • Five: Educated Native Proficiency

Rather than saying you’re looking for “Advanced Professional Proficiency,” provide examples of what that would look like to your company. The Scale’s definitions can help with communicating those expectations. For example:

“When speaking in their second language, the candidate will be able to communicate with a great deal of fluency, grammatical accuracy, and a complex vocabulary.  They will be able to both write and edit formal and informal correspondence, official reports and documents, and professional articles.”

During the interview, ensure you actually assess the second language skills that you have identified as important. If the role will involve the successful candidate rapidly switching between two languages in conversations, simulate that experience during an interview question. If the role will involve a significant amount of writing in the candidate’s second language, give them a short on-the-spot assignment to get a better sense of how accurately and efficiently they can capture their thoughts in writing.

Talk to a Recruiting Expert with Bilingual Staffing Experience

A brief call with one of Ian Martin’s hiring consultants can provide invaluable insight to help you find great bilingual candidates. With over six decades of experience in technical recruitment and project staffing, Ian Martin understands the unique nuances of finding and placing bilingual technical talent. We also have an extensive network of bilingual talent across North America ready to work on your projects. Connect with one of Ian Martin’s hiring consultants today to discuss your bilingual talent search strategy.

Elevate Your Job Ads

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If you’re not attracting the kind of candidates you were hoping for, it might be time to take a closer look at your job ads. Job seekers’ search habits change over time, so what might have been an effective ad a few years ago could be falling flat today. We’ve captured the latest advice on writing a strategically crafted job ad in the infographic below to help you attract the attention of today’s top talent.

   Going Mobile

1) Who’s searching for a job on their phone?

2) Make a direct call to smartphone users

Keep the ad to a concise 300 – 700 words

Shoot for 13 words per sentence

Break up 1/3 of ad content with bullet points

 Mind Your Words

  Use terms like “You” and “We” instead of “The Ideal Candidate” and “Our Employees”

  Include specific qualifications, experience, and skillsets to reduce unqualified candidates

  Differentiate between MUST-HAVE skills and NICE-TO-HAVE skills

  Eliminate acronyms and jargon: WFH B2B think outside the box synergy

   Remember What You’re Writing

It’s a job ad, not a job description. SELL potential candidates on why your company is a great place to work. Do you have a unique culture you’re proud of? Highlight the specific benefits of working at your company to draw candidates in.

   Time it Right

 Best Day to Post: Monday

Job search engines get their most traffic at the beginning of the work week.

 Best Time to Post: Morning

Get your ad at the top of the pile when job hunters start their daily search.

   An Example:

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Start with a clear and solid title that contains words job seekers would search for. Keep the tone friendly but approachable.

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Open with something to grab your reader’s attention — something that isn’t about your company, but that places the role in an exciting light.

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Use language that includes your reader – invite them into your world!

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Don’t overdo it on the list of duties – your goal here is to provide enough information to give your job seeker a taste of what the role looks like.

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Instead of a list of ideal candidate traits, include a description of the types of skills and personality attributes that will make someone successful at the job.

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Does your company have a mission and passion? Scream it from the rooftops!

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List unique perks and benefits about working at your company.

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Money matters — if you’re able, state your salary. When job ads specify a salary, they receive 30% more applications.

Also, include some attractive qualities about your office, such as location, transportation details, and amenities to draw your prospects in.

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Conclude with a strong call to action that tells candidates how to apply, and how to get in touch should they require further information.

Are you wondering if your job ads could use a lift?

Connect with one of our Hiring Consultants for a review of one of your recent job ads.

BOOK A TIME HERE

Focus on Clean Energy: Big Batteries = Big Business

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The tricky part about relying on Mother Nature for clean energy is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. There’s also the opposite end of that problem, when weather conditions create a “perfect storm” of energy production that creates more power than the grid actually needs. Without a solution to store that excess power, electrical utilities must release it to avoid power surges that can damage appliances and lead to power outages. While selling that power to other utilities is an option, on a day with ideal conditions for renewable power generation the demand for the power may be quite low. There have been times in Ontario, for example, when an electrical utility has actually had to pay another province or state to take their excess power.

Those types of situations have global energy stakeholders feeling very hopeful about the opportunities that rapidly advancing lithium ion battery technology are creating for energy storage. Large-scale battery “farms” allow power from clean energy sources to be stored when it’s available and saved for distribution when it is needed most.

In the fall of 2017, all eyes were on Tesla when Elon Musk committed to build a 100-megawatt lithium ion battery facility in South Australia in 100 days or provide it free of charge. Musk and his team delivered and the project, which pairs the world’s largest lithium ion battery with a nearby wind farm, has made South Australia a world leader in dispatchable renewable energy. The project can power 30,000 homes for up to an hour in the event of a blackout, but will probably be used more often to even out electricity supplies.

Being hailed by some as the energy sector’s next disruptive technology, the rapidly decreasing costs of battery storage could radically transform the power industry. Battery-pack costs decreased to less than $230 per kilowatt-hour in 2016, compared with almost $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010, thanks in part to the growing market for batteries in the consumer goods and electric vehicle market.

Smaller scale energy storage is also driving growth in the battery industry. Home-based energy storage solutions, such as Tesla’s Powerwall, store solar energy collected through solar panels on the home and make it available on demand to power the home independently of the electrical grid.

Batteries aren’t the only way to store renewable energy. Other solutions include flywheels, fuel cells running on renewable hydrogen, and systems based on compressed air or pumped water. With more and more countries committing to phasing out coal-fired power, the global energy storage market is predicted to double six times between 2016 and 2030.

As the battery and energy storage market continues to grow, so too will the competition to secure the technical talent needed by the companies in this space. Electrical engineers, systems design engineers, software engineers, product managers, and field service technicians are just some of the positions these companies will require.

If you’re a job seeker interested in a career in clean tech, take a look at our current opportunities in the automotive, manufacturing,  power and nuclear sectors.  If you’d like to learn more about finding the right talent to help your organization reduce its carbon footprint, connect with an Ian Martin recruiter or download our Insider’s Guide to Technical Recruitment.

 

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Dear Amazon: Here are 4 things we think you should know about Toronto’s tech talent

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As a proud Canadian company with a downtown Toronto office, we were thrilled to learn that Toronto has been selected as one of the final 20 sites under consideration for Amazon’s second headquarters. In reviewing the list of the 19 other contenders, we know our country’s biggest city is up against some incredibly tough competition. As the Amazon team evaluates its HQ2 options, there a few things to consider that we think set Toronto apart when it comes to accessing some of the world’s best technical talent.

The world’s leading AI experts now call Toronto home

We know that Amazon is already using machine learning to do things like improve search results, product recommendations, and inventory management, so you’re well aware of the value that experts in AI can bring to your bottom line. Much like neighbours knocking on each other’s doors to borrow some milk, there are huge advantages associated with giving your team access to some of the world’s most cutting-edge AI work right in their home city. The University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab is home to 50 AI companies, representing one of the greatest concentrations of AI companies in any program in the world. Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District is also home to the Vector Institute, an independent research facility for AI that is focused on attracting the globe’s best deep learning and machine learning talent. You can learn more about why AI is red hot in Canada right now here.

Toronto provides access to TWO of Canada’s top tech markets from one location

While Toronto boasts Canada’s largest technical workforce, Amazon would also be able to tap into another incredible tech talent pool that’s located just a short commute from the city. Waterloo is just 113 km (70 miles) outside of Toronto, and in the last five years its tech talent market has grown by almost two-thirds, making it one of the fastest growing markets in the country. The Ontario government is moving ahead with preliminary work to build a new high-speed rail system that would make the commute between Toronto and Waterloo just an easy, breezy 48-minute ride. Current project timelines have that rail line up and running as early as 2025.

A Canadian location makes it easier to take a more global approach to talent acquisition

While there is a diverse range of tech talent in Toronto and its surrounding regions, there may be times when Amazon has a specific talent need that requires a global search. As the only remaining contender located north of the border, Toronto stands apart from a tech talent perspective because companies located here can access Canada’s fast-track visa program. In 2017, Canada’s federal government introduced changes to its immigration policy that make it easier for companies to bring in technical talent from other countries. Companies that need to bring high-skilled workers to Canada on a temporary basis now benefit from two-week processing of applications for work permits and, when necessary, temporary resident visas. Open work permits for spouses and study permits for dependents can also be processed in as little as two weeks.

Ontario’s world-renowned co-op programs help companies secure top tech talent before graduation

Toronto companies benefit from strong and strategic co-operative education programs at Ontario’s colleges and universities. By alternating school terms with related work placements, these programs create a unique blend of higher and hands-on learning that builds an important bridge between companies and students. According to Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada, in the fields of computer science and data processing alone there are 14 Ontario colleges and universities that offer co-op programs, including the University of Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier University, and the University of Toronto.

One more thing to consider

If the prospect of staffing Amazon HQ2 in a non-U.S. city seems complex, we’d like to assure you that it doesn’t have to be. By working with the Ian Martin Group, the Amazon team would have the support of North America’s most progressive recruitment and project-staffing firm on their side. Ian Martin has been staffing projects across Canada and the United States for over five decades and our expert team of project managers and recruiters is at the ready to help Amazon source the globe’s best technical talent. As a Certified B Corporation (‘B’ stands for ‘Benefit’), we meet the world’s highest standards for positive impact on our employees, customers, community, and the environment and we would apply those standards to help ensure Amazon’s smooth transition into the Canadian business landscape.

Selecting Toronto as the location won’t just be a win for our city. It will be a huge win for Amazon too! We look forward to hearing the results!

Disruptive Talent Download: 4 Key Questions to Help Orchestrate a Successful Shakeup

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Disruptive technology is a term used to define those technologies or products that completely transform an industry. The telephone, the personal computer, email, and cell phones are all great examples. These game-changing products and concepts don’t magically reveal themselves, however. They are brought about by innovative thinkers, or disruptors, who are particularly adept at seeing things from a different perspective, spotting hidden opportunities, challenging the status quo, and tapping into their unique vision to develop and execute new ideas.

In his book, The Master Switch, Tim Wu offers a fascinating account of one of North America’s original disruptors, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. According to Wu, it takes a special kind of personality to “scuttle a perfectly sound ship.” In Bell’s case, he was a true outsider. He wasn’t working for a telegraph company. He wasn’t even trying to improve the telegraph. This separation provided a distinct degree of distance from the industry he would eventually disrupt.

It takes an even stronger kind of confidence to propose a new product or concept that could completely obliterate your employer’s current business model. That is the “special sauce” that sets disruptive talent apart. It is the difference between the employee who stays focused on building a better car and the employee who proposes a solution where people no longer actually buy their own cars but instead get from Point A to Point B using a ride sharing service provided by a fleet of self-driving battery operated cars.

Disruptive thinkers are a unique breed of talent. Bringing them on board in a way that will allow them to do their best work and move your organization’s innovation agenda forward requires forethought. Here are a few questions to consider as you develop your organization’s strategy for recruiting and onboarding disruptive talent.

Question #1: Is your organization actually ready to welcome disruptive talent into the fold?

Getting your leadership team to agree that it’s time to bring in someone with bold new ideas is a pretty easy sell. Ensuring those same leaders are going to be supportive when a new employee begins proposing changes to the business that are a radical shift from what you’ve been doing is a completely different matter.

Question #2: Is there a chance your recruitment strategy could hinder your search for disruptive thinkers?

Once you’ve decided that your organization is indeed ready to take on the unique challenges of adding some disruptive talent to the team, it’s time to take a good look at your recruitment strategy. The characteristics and qualities that your organization traditionally seeks in candidates may not necessarily apply when you’re trying to find disruptive talent. Malcolm Gladwell, writer for The New Yorker, proposes that disruptors aren’t just creative thinkers who are conscientious enough to implement their big ideas; they are also typically disagreeable. True disrupters shake things up because they don’t require the approval of their peers to do what they believe is correct. They also aren’t concerned if everyone around them thinks they’re crazy! If your recruitment process weeds out candidates who aren’t team players and consensus seekers, you could be ruling out the very talent you’re trying to find.

Question #3: Does your organization have an onboarding strategy in place that will help set disruptive talent up for success?

Once you’ve hired disruptive talent, turning them loose on the organization without the proper support can be a recipe for disaster. Coaching is key and it should start with developing a personalized coaching strategy and individual development plan that reflects the unique needs of each disruptive thinker.

Question #4: Are your organizational values entrenched enough to set the course when big change rocks the boat?

Imagine the frustration a child would feel if they were told the sandbox they were playing in had no rules, but then were scolded each time they did something differently than the other children playing. Being told, “That’s not the way we do business here,” is a sure path to disengagement for your disruptive thinkers, but that doesn’t mean the sandbox shouldn’t have some operating guidelines.

If your company has defined its vision, mission, and values, are they engrained enough within your organizational culture to help guide decision making when a potentially disruptive decision is met with resistance? Are they clear enough to serve as a kind of “Magic 8 Ball” to help reach consensus on why or why not a potential game changer should be embraced?

Spending some time thinking about your company’s answers to these questions is a great first step in developing a disruptive talent recruitment strategy. Ian Martin’s experienced technical recruiters can also offer valuable insight into finding, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding disruptive talent. Connect with one of our Hiring Consultants today to find your next disruptive shaker-upper.

Download our Disruptive Technology Dictionary.

 

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Getting Giggy With It: 4 Things Employers Need to Consider Before Forging Ahead with a Freelance Hire

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The gig economy. Solopreneurs. Side hustling. Free agents. Workforce 2.0. No matter what you call it, there is no doubt that the economy is in the midst of a huge shift in the world of paid work. In 2016, nearly 53 million of workers in America were freelance, which makes up approximately 34% of the workforce. That number is only expected to grow. In fact, research by McKinsey suggests that by 2025, the online talent platforms that connect freelance workers with companies could add $2.7 trillion to global GDP.

As technologies that connect freelance workers and employers evolve, it’s no longer just companies like Uber driving the on-demand labour movement. Robotics, blockchain, Bitcoin, augmented reality, and deep learning were amongst the top ten fastest–growing freelance skills in the third quarter of 2017, according to online freelancing website, Upwork.

But before companies jump onto one of the many online freelancing platforms to find talent for an upcoming project, there are some important things to consider.

How will your company make decisions about which work can be outsourced to freelancers and which might be better executed by an internal team?

Not every project is a good fit for contracting out to an independent consultant. Download our 5-Minute Outsourcing Assessment to start the conversation within your organization about which projects might be a good fit for a freelance solution.

How will your company determine which freelancers to work with?

Basing freelance staffing decisions on the proposed hourly rate alone can lead to disappointment. Reviewing work samples and asking for references from past clients will help you do a better job of determining the quality of the work you can expect from the person.

Could the freelancer’s proposed work arrangement be characterized by the Canada Revenue Agency as a personal services business?

It’s not enough for a freelancer to just say they are a freelancer. The Canada Revenue Agency uses a four-fold test to determine if the relationship between your company and the freelancer is an employer-employee-like relationship or a business relationship. If the relationship is deemed more like an employer-employee relationship, there could be expensive tax implications for the freelancer. Should that happen, it could impact the freelancer’s decision to continue performing work for your company. Share our 5 Ways to Determine Your Personal Business Risk with your company’s freelancers to help them understand what they can do to reduce the risk of being classified as a personal services business.

Who is responsible for training freelance staff?

Just because a person doing freelance work for your company isn’t categorized as an employee doesn’t necessarily mean that your company does not have any responsibilities when it comes to ensuring they can conduct the work safely on your behalf. Regulations vary by province, so ensure you have a thorough understanding and documentation in place to prove your company has fulfilled its legal obligations.

If you need contract or freelance staff, consider working with a recruitment agency.

Ian Martin’s contract staffing solutions can offer a hybrid approach that can bridge the gap between hiring additional salaried employees and getting outside assistance from independent freelancers.

Sure, you can find your own freelance candidate on sites like Upwork, but if you want to be sure that you’re getting the right person for the job, we can help. When you work with Ian Martin, our recruiters will help you hone in on the specific skills you need for the job so you get the right person more efficiently. They’ll also work to put your unique brand in the spotlight and leverage your company’s best attributes so you attract the top candidates for the job. Need someone for just a short while? In for the long haul? We’ll scale to fit your specific business needs.

CIOs: 7 Ways to Deal with Talent Scarcity

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The IT skills shortage is a major issue for CIOs. Companies are competing for top talent, and there aren’t enough highly skilled employees to go around. The problem is only going to get worse. A recent Gartner report revealed there would be 1.4 million openings for computer specialists by 2020, but only enough qualified graduates to fill about 30 percent of the jobs. This is a problem keeping CIOs up at night.

Since the IT talent shortage isn’t going away anytime soon, CIOs need to find strategies to deal with it. With the right strategies, CIOs can compete for talented workers and get the skills they need on their teams.

To deal with talent scarcity, use these seven strategies.

1. Train Your Current Employees

You already have several talented employees on your team. They may not have the exact skills you need for future projects, but they may be able to learn them. After all, they’re intelligent IT professionals. Training your current employees may be easier than finding new employees who have the exact mix of skills you need.

For example, if you’re having trouble finding a Java developer, you could teach one of your current developers about Java. If you can’t find a big data expert, you might have an analytical employee who’s interested in learning about it.

Online training can be used to teach employees new skills. Universities and consulting companies also offer training programs, so there are plenty of options. Carefully vet training programs first to ensure they’re offered by reputable organizations and will teach your employees the right skills.

You could also choose to offer in-person training for your employees. Internal or external trainers can teach your employees the skills you need them to have. Employees could also learn new skills by attending local industry conferences.

2. Pay Attention to Retention

When you’re struggling to find skilled employees for your team, the last thing you need is high turnover. When employees quit, talent scarcity problems get worse. You need to replace the employees who left while trying to grow your team at the same time. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to retention.

In this competitive labour market, compensation plays a big role in retention. Ensure your team’s salaries, benefits, and perks are competitive in the marketplace. Offering competitive compensation helps prevent your employees from leaving to work for your competitors.

Of course, money isn’t everything. Employees also need to feel appreciated at work. Appreciation can take the form of rewards systems, good feedback, and opportunities for advancement. Taking steps to make your employees feel appreciated and valued can help you keep them on your team. This could be as simple as congratulating your employees when they do a good job or occasionally providing bonuses.

3. Ask Employees to Refer Candidates

Your current IT employees have connections in the industry. They’ve met other IT professionals at school, at past workplaces, and at industry events. Some of those professionals may have the hard-to-find skills you’re looking for, but you might not be able to find them on your own. To reach these candidates, set up an employee referral program.

Let your current employees know you’re planning to hire new IT employees, and share the job descriptions for the roles you want to fill. Ask them if they know anyone who could be a good fit for the job. Your employees can then refer possible candidates to you. If you end up hiring someone based on a referral, reward the employee who made the referral. This could take the form of a cash bonus or another type of positive recognition.

4. Attract Top Talent with Your Company Culture

When talent is scarce, highly skilled candidates can afford to be picky. They can get job offers from multiple companies and then decide which one they want to accept. Salary and benefits are a consideration, but top candidates also think about company culture. Company culture means the personality of the company and the environment employees work in.

If your company culture is attractive, top candidates may choose to accept your job offers instead of working for your competitors. A healthy work-life balance, a strong sense of teamwork, and a meaningful company mission are some features of attractive company cultures. You can advertise attractive parts of your company culture in your job postings.

5. Use Data Analytics to Improve the Hiring Process

Companies have large quantities of data about job applicants. These days, candidates often apply electronically, and their resumes are stored indefinitely in applicant tracking systems. This data isn’t very useful if all you’re doing is storing it. Since you already have so much data, it’s time to start using it. Data analytics can improve your hiring process and help you hire the skilled employees you need.

To get started, dig into your data and look for patterns. For example, you could look for where your best applicants are finding you. If most of your top candidates came from referrals, not job boards, then it makes sense to focus more of your attention on referrals. You could also look at the educational backgrounds of your best applicants. If many top applicants went to the same schools, it could make sense for you to visit those schools for a job fair.

6. Plan for Your Future Talent Needs

In IT, it can be hard to plan for your future talent needs. Your staffing requirements change from one quarter to the next depending on the projects you need to complete. While you may not know exactly what skills you’ll need in the future, or when you’ll need them, you can still prepare.

Even when you’re not actively hiring, you should always be building your talent pipeline. Throughout the year, collect referrals from employees and work your own network to find candidates. Keep these candidates on file, even if you don’t have open positions for them yet.

When it’s time for you to hire, you’ll have many possible candidates to reach out to. Those candidates may be interested in joining your team, even if they’re already working somewhere else. Your company’s interesting projects, competitive salaries, or attractive culture could help convince candidates to leave their jobs to work for you.

7. Get Help from a Recruitment Agency

CIOs don’t need to manage their talent needs alone. They can turn to recruitment agencies for help. Some recruitment agencies specialize in placing candidates in technical roles, like IT. Recruiters at these agencies have the networks and skills required to locate candidates with hard-to-find IT skills. Since you’re busy, it makes sense to outsource your hiring needs.

Recruitment agencies can even find candidates who are already employed somewhere else. The best candidates may already be working for other companies in your industry but can be persuaded to leave for the right opportunity.

Talent scarcity is a big problem in IT, but it doesn’t need to keep CIOs up at night. By adopting some or all of these seven strategies, you can acquire the IT skills you need. With the right people on your team, you’ll be able to finish your projects and stay competitive.

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What IT Hiring Managers Should Consider When Hiring Developers

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Do you need to hire some new developers? It’s important to choose the right candidates, but this is often easier said than done. IT hiring managers may feel like they need a guide for hiring IT professionals with confidence.

Here are some factors IT hiring managers should consider when hiring developers.

Hard Skills

When you’re hiring developers, you need to consider their hard skills. Hard skills are the job-specific skills that are necessary to succeed in a position. Candidates require these skills to perform well in their jobs and add value to your team. For example, an iOS developer needs to have a strong knowledge of Objective C, Cocoa Touch, iOS SDK, and XCTest. A Java developer needs to have an expert-level skill of Java.

Since these skills are essential for success, you need to be sure job candidates have them. Anyone can list Java expertise on a resume. To make sure candidates actually have the right skills, have them perform a short test during interviews. This test could be a short problem your team recently solved. By observing candidates work through the test, you can evaluate their skills.

As an IT hiring manager, you’re not an expert in all the hard skills your developers need to know. That’s fine, and nobody expects you to be an expert. However, this can make it harder to evaluate candidates’ hard skills. For help evaluating developers, look to your existing team. You probably have some talented people on your team who could sit in on interviews with you. For example, when you’re interviewing new Java developers, have one of your existing Java developers evaluate candidates’ hard skills.

Soft Skills

Hard skills are essential, but soft skills are also really important. Soft skills are the personal attributes candidates need to perform well on your team. These skills are linked to personality, so they’re harder for candidates to improve or change. That’s why IT hiring managers need to ensure candidates have the right soft skills during the hiring process.

Communication is a key soft skill for developers. These professionals need to be able to communicate clearly with managers, coworkers, and clients. To assess this skill during interviews, ask candidates to describe past situations that required good communication skills. For example, ask them to tell you about a time they had to explain a technical concept to a non-technical client.

Teamwork is another essential soft skill for developers. Even developers who work remotely have to work as part of a team and get along with their coworkers. Good teamwork skills let developers advance projects instead of holding them back. To evaluate teamwork skills, ask candidates to tell you about a time they helped solve a problem with a team.

Cultural Fit

Every company has a culture. Company culture is made up of the beliefs and behaviours that govern interactions within the company. When you’re hiring developers, it’s important to consider cultural fit. Employees who fit in with your culture are more likely to perform well and stay with the company.

For example, if your company has a relaxed culture and employees have flexible schedules, seek a developer with a laid-back personality who can manage his own schedule. If your company has a team-oriented culture and an open-office seating plan, look for a personable employee who prefers to work as part of a team. By hiring for cultural fit, you can hire employees who can thrive in your company’s environment.

During interviews, ask candidates to describe their ideal work environments. Ask them about their preferred work style and favourite management styles. These questions can help you determine which candidates will thrive in your company’s environment.

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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 Most In-Demand Engineering Jobs in Canada

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If you’re an engineer, your career prospects are probably pretty enviable. Many industries already need your knowledge, and salaries start relatively high. However, demand for your skills is only set to increase in the next few years as older professionals age out of their positions. Overall, the future looks rosy for you and your peers.

Still, some jobs are more desirable than others. In-demand positions will offer you the ability to distinguish yourself faster and move up the ranks at a younger age. This will allow you greater freedom and control over your career choices. The right decision could put you on the fast track to success. 

But how can you determine which careers will offer the best long-term potential, and how will these jobs balance this promise with your immediate needs? These are both valuable questions, and this article will help you answer them. We’ll look at a few of the most auspicious engineering jobs in Canada and how they’ll change across industries within the next few years. There’s no better time than the present to start planning your future, and this list will help you do just that.

Software Engineers

You can expect a prosperous career if you have a background in software engineering. Demand for this position has grown at lightspeedsince 2006, and it shows no sign of slowing down. It currently ranks seventh on Canadian Business’s list of Canada’s best jobs, and while increasing salaries have led to a proportionate rise in job competition, graduates are still highly valued in today’s job market.

Software engineers can take on a wide range of roles, depending on the organization that employs them. These professionals usually create and design specifications for software, but they may also be involved in testing products, investigating their efficiency, and training new users on how to use them.

Petroleum Engineers

Considering the recent slump in oil prices, this engineering specialty may seem odd as an in-demand discipline. However, Canada’s petroleum industry is set to rebound in 2017, with job growth surging to 300 percent by 2018 before slowing slightly to 200 percent by 2024. Regardless, prospects don’t look as grim as they once did for these engineering jobs in Canada.

Demand isn’t the only selling point for petroleum engineers. Median salaries hover just below $105,000 per year, so these professionals can expect to live large. Petroleum engineers can also seek work with a wide variety of employers, from government or research organizations to oil extractors and more.

Aerospace Engineers

The aerospace industry seems to have contracted since 2009, as companies have shed 21 percent of their workers. However, this field can still guarantee plenty of engineering jobs in Canada over the next few years. Rapid retirement rates and projected growth mean that about 1,400 jobs per year could be available through 2024.

Engineers who specialize in aerospace generally require more education in order to compete. Still, these professionals can hold one of many roles. Salaries have also grown steadily, and while the current median sits below the six-digit mark, there may be an increase over time.

Electronics Engineers

You’ve already heard about software, and now it’s time to learn about hardware. Compared to other performers on this list, electronics engineering growth seems slightly slow. Demand has only increased by about 4.4 percent in five years, and significant growth isn’t expected until 2022 at least. But electronics engineering still places 24th on the Canadian Business list of the top 100 jobs, and median salaries have generally increased by about 16 percent since 2009.

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What You Can Expect When Working With a Recruiter

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Working with a recruiter can be a great way to streamline your hiring process and help alleviate the stress of finding qualified candidates and filling positions. Recruiters offer a great deal of support with great results. If you’re new to working with a recruiter, here are some of the things that you can expect.

A Strong Relationship

An important part of a recruiter’s job is to form a strong relationship with their clients. In order to find you the best candidates to fill roles, they need to understand the unique needs of your business, the technologies and processes you deal with everyday, your workplace environment, and the values you look for in employees.

One of the biggest aspects of hiring is finding employees who aren’t just able to complete the work satisfactorily, but who will be a good fit in the company, and mesh well in your business’s corporate culture. In order for a recruitment agency to find you the best people, they’ll need to understand that corporate culture. You can expect a lot of personal attention and care from your recruiter, and detailed questions about business operations. They may even ask to come observe for small periods of time, all of which is part of forming a good relationship.

Less Stressful Hiring Process

Hiring can be a very stressful experience, and is one of the big reasons companies turn to recruiters in the first place. There’s a lot riding on hiring decisions, and partnering with a recruiter can alleviate the anxiety that comes with finding the right candidates. They make the process as painless as possible, wading through applications, finding candidates and vetting them, and putting them through qualifying tests so that when you finally do sit down to interview people, you’re only seeing the very best options available. Recruiters also help with onboarding and paperwork, and often even train new employees, so that the entire process of hiring, from beginning to end, is less stressful.

In-Depth Market Knowledge

Recruiters make it their job to keep up to date on labour markets and employment trends. They are deeply familiar with the industries they work with, and have a vast amount of knowledge about hiring practices and complexities. When you partner with a recruiter, you have access to this knowledge, as well as to the deep networks that recruiters foster—networks that put them in contact with some of the most highly skilled workers available.

When working with a recruiter, you can expect a high level of expertise inyour industry’s employment markets—insight that can be of great value to your company. Working with a recruiter means having access to people who have their finger on the pulse of economic and employment trends and markets.

Best Pool of Candidates

One of the key differences you’ll notice when you begin working with a recruiter is that the pool of candidates will increase in quality. When hiring on your own, you’ll often have to wade through numerous applications and resumes that don’t meet the necessary qualifications, with only a disappointing number of applicants actually making the cut.

Recruiters have access to larger pools of candidates, using their networks to source workers that wouldn’t normally apply, or who can’t be found through traditional job postings. Recruiters also thoroughly vet and qualify all candidates before they reach you, meaning that you won’t even see those who don’t have the necessary qualifications. Instead, you’ll notice that the candidates you’re interviewing for positions are only the most qualified people for the job.

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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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Does it make sense to outsource

10 Strategies Top CIOs Use to Reduce IT Costs

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Are you under pressure to reduce your IT costs? Many CIOs are coming under pressure to reduce these costs. The cost reduction targets you’ve been given may seem impossible to meet. The good news is there are many strategies you can use to cut costs without harming the IT department or the overall company. Which strategies you choose to use will vary depending on the situation at your company and your goals. With that in mind, here are 10 strategies top CIOs can use to reduce their IT costs.

1. Reducing Number of Projects

Some CIOs are reducing the number of IT projects to control costs. To complete projects, you might need to bring on new staff or pay overtime to your existing staff. Cutting back on projects reduces the need for additional labour and helps keep costs under control.

However, you have to be careful about which projects you cut. Projects that could transform the business, like the development of innovative technologies, could be well worth the money. Projects that just support business operations, like upgrading internal technologies, could be put on hold.

2. Reducing Personnel Costs

As you know, your employees’ wages are a big part of your IT budget. That’s why some CIOs are reducing personnel costs to meet their budget targets. Controlling personnel costs can be challenging when your talent needs change from one quarter to the next. If you have enough staff to cover your busy periods, you’ll have too many during slow periods. You’ll have to keep paying your IT employees, even though there’s nothing for them to do. If you have enough employees to handle the slow periods, they’ll be overworked during busy periods. These are stay-awake recruitment issues.

To save money, you can turn to contract staffing. You can maintain adequate staffing levels to handle the company’s slow periods. Contract staffing can then fill in the gaps and help you manage higher-demand periods. It may make sense to outsource contract staffing recruitment to save time and money. When a new project approaches, a technical recruitment company can quickly find contractors for you. When the project ends, you can let them go. This flexibility can help you keep your personnel costs under control.

3. Taking Steps to Lower Turnover

High turnover is expensive. Companies can spend six to nine months of a departing employee’s salary to find and train a replacement. Those costs add up quickly if you have high turnover on your team. To reduce IT costs, top CIOs are taking steps to reduce turnover.

There are many ways to do this. One strategy is to improve your company’s culture to make it a more appealing place to work. Good work-life balance, the opportunity for advancement within the company, and access to training are appealing parts of company culture you could encourage.

4. Performing Less Software Maintenance

Software maintenance can get expensive. In fact, after five years, most companies will have spent more money on software maintenance than the software cost to purchase in the first place. For that reason, some CIOs are performing less software maintenance to reduce IT costs.

For example, instead of paying to upgrade existing software, they could decide to keep using the older versions. This could be a good strategy for you if your software isn’t too old and still meets most of your needs. If the software is so old as to be obsolete, skipping maintenance could end up costing more.

5. Using Open-Source Software

Licensing fees can be expensive, and some top CIOs are switching to open-source software to save money. Open-source software is usually free, so you can save money on licensing fees. Gartner estimates using open-source software can save companies about three percent. That may not seem like much, but when combined with other strategies, it could help you cut costs in your department.

6. Using Less Expensive Hardware

Using less expensive hardware is another strategy for cost reduction. When it’s time to replace your current hardware, look for options that are less expensive. Since hardware lasts for years, remember to think about costs in the long term, not just the initial purchase costs.

For example, it may make sense to purchase Macs rather than PCs, even though the upfront cost for the former is higher. IBM says it saves up to $543 every time it purchases a Mac instead of a PC. That’s because the residual value for Macs is higher in the long term.

7. Encouraging End Users to Help Themselves

Reducing IT support costs is another strategy for cost reduction. Many of the people who contact your IT service desk for help don’t really need the assistance of a paid professional. With IT self-service, as many as 40 percent of people could help themselves. This means you won’t have as much need for Level 1 support and can reduce some costs.

Make it easy for people to find the answers to their problems and help themselves. For example, you could set up an internal self-service portal to help employees throughout the company resolve their problems. They could use the portal to reset their own passwords, instead of having to ask IT for help. This can help you reduce labour costs at the IT service desk.

8. Renegotiating Contracts with Suppliers

Contracts with vendors and suppliers can always be negotiated. Don’t assume a signed contract means you can’t try to negotiate with your suppliers until the contract expires. The contracts will end at some point, and your suppliers are probably hoping you’ll renew when that happens. Suppliers know they have to keep you happy during the contract term if they want you to renew later. That means you have some leverage.

Call your suppliers and explain the reasons you need better pricing. In exchange for a contract extension or another incentive, your suppliers may be more than willing to give you a better price. Try to be flexible during negotiations to encourage your suppliers to want to help you.

9. Switching to Cheaper Suppliers

If your current suppliers can’t or won’t give you a better deal, their competitors may be able to help. Before the contracts expire, seek formal bids from other companies in the industry. You can then compare the bids and choose new suppliers that will give you better value for your money. For example, startup companies may be willing to provide lower prices than your current suppliers to grow their client lists.

You could also use the bids you collect to re-negotiate with your current suppliers. If suppliers weren’t willing to negotiate previously, seeing bids from competitors could encourage them to start.

10. Moving to the Cloud

On-premise services have several associated costs. You need to pay for software licenses, upgrade expenses, and server maintenance. There’s also power and cooling costs to worry about. You need to pay employees to look after these responsibilities.

Moving to the cloud can help you reduce these expenses and control costs. You just need to budget for a monthly fee for the services—not all the extra costs you’re paying now. When you use cloud-based services, you can stretch your IT budget further.

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IT Staffing and Recruiting Tips: How to Hire Talented Developers

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Since developers are in high demand, hiring can be a challenge. IT managers need all the help they can get with IT staffing and recruiting. To make hiring talented developers easier, follow these tips.

Stop Relying on Job Ads

If your only recruitment strategy is posting job ads on online job boards, it’s time to branch out. While you can find good candidates from job ads, it’s not always the most efficient recruitment method. When you post a job ad online, tons of unqualified applicants send in their resumes. Worse, you may not even get any applicants you want to interview.

Why are so many unqualified applicants applying for your jobs? Since developers are in high demand, the most talented ones may already be employed somewhere else. They aren’t browsing job boards. To find the top developers you need, you need to switch up your tactics.

Ask for Employee Referrals

One of the ways you can find top developers is to ask your current employees for referrals. The good developers on your team probably know other people in the industry. Let your employees know you’re looking to hire new developers, and ask them for referrals. Your employees may know people who might be interested in your open roles.

To encourage referrals, make it easy for your employees to refer candidates. Ideally, employees should be able to simply pass on the names and contact information of referred candidates.

If you end up hiring someone through an employee referral, make sure to reward the employee who made the referral. Different employees value different rewards, so just ask. Some employees may want cash bonuses, while others would prefer an extra vacation day. Others might prefer getting thanked for the referral publicly.

Work Your Network

Your employees aren’t the only ones who might know interested candidates. As an IT manager, you probably have a large network of your own. Let your contacts know you’re looking for a great developer to join your team. One of your contacts may know a developer who’d be interested in your open position.

If nobody in your network can help, grow your network. You could attend IT conferences to meet new people. For example, you could go to iTech2017, an IT technology conference. At this conference, you could meet other IT managers and CIOs. Someone you meet could be able to help you fill the open developer positions on your team. You may be able to help your new contacts fill their open positions, too. When a new hire comes up, you can then reach out to your new contacts on social media channels like LinkedIn to crowdsource potential candidates.

Get Help from a Technical Recruiting Agency

Sometimes, you need a new developer for your team right away. You don’t have time to ask employees for referrals or go to conferences. You need your new developer yesterday. In situations like this, you can get help from a technical recruiting agency. Since recruiters have great networking skills, they can find the top candidates you need quickly.

Technical recruiters have a lot of experience with IT staffing and recruiting. They have large pools of talented candidates they can call on. If they don’t have any suitable candidates in their pool, they can work their networks to find top talent. They can even locate candidates who are already employed somewhere else. While these passive candidates may not be actively job hunting, they may be interested in joining your team. When you need qualified developers and IT staff at the right time, it makes sense to outsource your recruiting.

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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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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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How Hiring a Software Developer Can Be Made Easy

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Do you need to hire a software developer or a team of developers? This is a big challenge for any hiring manager. Software developers are in high demand in today’s labour market. Companies need to work hard to recruit them.

As a busy hiring manager, there’s no way you can spend every work day for the next six months looking for software developers. You need to hire developers, and you need to hire them fast.

But, how can you easily hire a software developer? Use the tips below.

Use Your Culture

Workplace culture refers to the work environment on your team and in the company. It can be hard to define, and culture can vary from one team to another. Culture can include the attitudes, beliefs, and underlying assumptions of your employees. For example, your team may have a culture of independence and individual problem solving. Or, your team may have a culture of teamwork. Perhaps your company is heavily invested in IT innovation. Whatever your culture is, it can help you attract developers who are a good fit for your team.

News travels fast through the industry, so word about your culture will get out on its own. If your employees like working on your team, they’ll tell other people in the industry. You can also advertise your culture to make sure it’s clear. For example, you could be active on social media to give candidates a sneak peek into your company’s culture.

Emphasize Exciting Projects

Software development is all about solving problems. Developers are passionate about solving problems, and you can use this to attract them to your company.

During recruitment, talk about interesting problems your team has solved in past projects or exciting projects they’ve worked on. Talking about these projects gives candidates an idea of the type of work they’d be doing for your team.

Ask your candidates how they would have solved your team’s past challenges. This will give you an idea of how they’d approach problem solving if you end up hiring them.

Seek out Passive Candidates

Since software developers are in such high demand, the best candidates are probably already employed. However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get them to join your team. Nearly three-quarters of employed workers would consider a new job if they were approached. These workers are known as passive candidates. They’re not actively looking for work, so they won’t see ads you post on job boards. However, since they’re open to making career moves, they could respond well if you reached out to them directly. You can use employee referrals or your network to get in contact with passive candidates.

There are three main reasons why passive candidates are open to new work. A desire for a higher salary is the main reason. A need for a change of scenery and a lack of advancement opportunities are the other reasons. If you can offer a better salary, exciting work, or advancement opportunities, you may be able to lure away passive candidates.

Work with an IT Recruiter

If you need a software developer right away, you may not have time to try any of the above strategies. To hire a software developer in a short timeframe, consider working with an IT recruiter.

IT recruiters already have networks of talented professionals they can call on, so you can hire IT talent quickly and with confidence. Many of these IT professionals may already be employed, so IT recruiters can also help you find passive candidates.

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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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When Is the Best Time to Hire Contract Staff?

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Contract staffing has saved many companies from certain doom. When business owners find themselves in a tight spot, they can temporarily hire skilled professionals who will help get them out of it. The hiring manager can renew their contracts if continued labour is required, or the contract workers can be let go if the job is complete. There are more contract workers than full-time employees in some fields, so employers don’t lack for options, either. 

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When It Makes Sense to Hire a Contractor

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Full-time workers can’t handle every task your company requires. These professionals may be versatile, but they still have their limitations. There are only a few hours in a working day, so you need to ensure your employees can complete all their necessary assignments within that time. 

Unfortunately, there’s always be more work to be done, and as projects go on, there may be a need for a specific skillset that goes beyond the scope of your current workforce. When this happens, it’s your job as a hiring manager to find workers who can get the job done. If you can’t find the right talent, your company may fall behind on its projects and incur substantial financial penalties as a result. 

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid this outcome, and working with a contractor is among the best options. The right contractor will alleviate stress from your team and help you meet your goals on time. 

So when is the right time to hire a contractor? The answer will vary depending on your specific needs, but this article should help you figure out the most efficient way to hire contract staff.

Your Team Lacks Specific Abilities

If your company operates in a technical field, your workers will need a very particular set of skills. Yet within those qualifications, most full-time employees need to have a broad range of abilities. After all, why would you hire someone who could only complete a few specialized tasks? 

Unfortunately, broader isn’t always better when it comes to expertise. Your employees need to have a breadth of knowledge, but projects often crop up that need very specialized skills or experience that your full time workers may not have. 

When it comes to short-term technical projects, you should start looking for contract workers who can complete the job. You may not have use for their skills at other times, but they can prove indispensable under the right conditions.

You Need Seasonal or Temporary Workers

Every organization has its busy periods. Work may be scant in January, but come June, the conditions might be right and business will prosper. When this happens, you can’t be caught flatfooted. Your company will have limited time to make use of this productivity boom.

Temporary contractors can accommodate your needs. You can hire them to fixed-term contracts that allow you to renew or dismiss them according to your needs. Best of all, you can re-employ these workers later on if they agree to your terms, which means you’ll get reliable performance on a regular basis.

You Need Immediate Productivity

It takes time for full-time workers to get up to speed. Often, they spend their first few weeks learning about their roles before they can achieve full productivity. This shouldn’t be a problem if your projects are on track, but the same situation can divert valuable resources when you’re in a pinch. 

Contract workers don’t require this preparation. They can’t rely on long-term work, so they must be flexible in order to get new jobs. As a result, they’ll be able to adapt to your culture more quickly than a full-time employee would.

You’re Approaching a Deadline

Looming deadlines put substantial pressure on everyone. Workers often have to put in overtime to meet their targets, while managers may fret about getting the most out of their existing staff.

But what if you didn’t have to push your own employees to get the job done? If you bring in contract professionals, you’ll have more personnel without the expense that comes with hiring new staff members. You’ll finish your projects on time with these workers’ help.

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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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The Top Engineering Jobs in Canada

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Engineers are the belles of the ball right now. The profession is about to undergo a wave of demand for new employees as older workers retire and leave the industry. This is leaving behind a wealth of engineering job opportunities for new job seekers. Those who have experience and a clear sense of direction can use this trend to jumpstart their careers.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be obstacles, though. Some engineers are still unable to find work, while others find it difficult to pass the tough hiring criteria that it takes to find gainful employment. The horizon may look bright for engineers, but that might not offer hope for those who are still in the dark.

Fortunately, there’s still some proactive things you can do if you’re looking or about to look for work. Companies still have high demand for some engineering disciplines, and these fields offer a host of other benefits that should make them attractive to any qualified professional. If any of these top engineering jobs suit your fancy, you may want to consider adapting your career path to pursue them.

Electrical Engineer

Specializing in electrical engineering can really give your career a boost. Workers in this field design and maintain a range of solutions that harness the power of electricity. Whether they build electronic components, create control systems, or find new ways to generate and transmit power, these professionals usually benefit from exciting and fruitful career paths.

You’ll need to build up a strong resume if you want to land one of these top engineering jobs. While these jobs only call for a bachelor’s degree in engineering, many firms look for workers that hold a master’s degree. A lot of the work is doneindependently on computers, but there is also some teamwork involved as well, so you need to be able to work in both environments.

Manufacturing Engineer

Engineers are frequently involved in the design stage of a product’s development, but those who specialize in manufacturing go a step further. They create tools and processes that actually enhance product development. Whether they’re tasked with reducing costs or designing goods that cut down on production time, these professionals take an active role in crafting everyday products.

Workers in this field are similar to industrial engineers, and they can find jobs in a variety of industries. On average, they earn about $83,000 per year, though professionals who work in more lucrative industries such as aerospace or transportation may take home more.

Software Engineer

Software is as much a part of the modern world as roads, cars, and buildings. Yet it’s easy to think of these tools as nebulous aspects of life. But behind every program there’s a dedicated team of engineers working to improve, update, and maintain services. It’s easily one of the most relevant engineering disciplines, and software specialists are in high demand all over the world.

Professionals in this field can expect to earn salaries in the low six figures, and the industry will continue to grow through 2024. Candidates will need at least a bachelor’s degree to find work. If you can work well with others, solve problems efficiently, and analyze data, you may be well suited to a career in this profession.

Petroleum Engineer

Despite a recent downturn, the oil industry is slowly bouncing back. Companies will need to hire a glut of new engineers to replace those who left in the initial slump. Those who are suited to the position should consider it as a viable career path.

Chemical, petroleum, and mining engineers can expect to earn about $84,000 from working in the oil industry. If you fulfill these criteria, you could be on your way to landing one of the top engineering jobs in Canada.

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What’s the Most Efficient Way to Hire Contract Staff?

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Your company’s staffing needs are rarely static. You may have a long-term strategy in place, but it only takes a few slight deviations to throw that entire plan into disarray. Whether you have a firm idea of your organization’s future or you’re just starting to think about it, you need to be able to adapt your hiring practices to fit both your immediate and potential needs.

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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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How to Improve Your Onboarding Process

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Sometimes, it can be difficult for workers to adapt to their new jobs. Roles and expectations may be different, and it can take time for newcomers to integrate themselves into a new work culture. The pressure to fit in can overwhelm recent hires, which is why an effective onboarding process is so important for many companies.

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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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How to Manage Contract Staff

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It takes a lot of work to manage your workforce well. You need to ensure workers have the tools they need to complete their duties, but you also have to motivate them so they’ll produce their best work. A professional’s underperformance may be due to external factors, but poor management often plays a role as well.

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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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When to Hire Contract Staff

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Timing is everything when it comes to hiring, especially if your company works on a project-by-project basis. Fail to bring on a new staff member when needed and you may lack the resources necessary to complete an assignment. This can have disastrous results. You may encounter cost overruns, missed deadlines, and employee burnout. If you want to avoid these problems, you need to make your hiring processes more efficient.

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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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4 Best Practices to Improve Your Candidate Experience

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What role do you have in shaping your company’s reputation? If you’re a hiring manager, you probably play a bigger part than you might imagine. After all, your job requires you to field external inquiries and even meet with professionals from outside of your company. Every interaction you have affects your audience’s perception of your company. This is known as candidate experience, and it’s more important than you may think.

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How Hiring Managers Can Find the Best Candidates—without the Stress

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Hiring managers spend their entire careers in pursuit of the perfect candidate. These mythical figures exceed every expectation listed in your job description and identify strongly with your organization’s values. Unfortunately, they only exist as an ideal to be sought after, and you’ll rarely encounter an applicant this qualified in the real world.

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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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Pressured to Find the Perfect Job Candidate? Here are 4 Hiring Tips

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No one ever sets out to hire the wrong employee. As a hiring manager, you take broad steps to ensure you only hire the most promising candidates. So how do these bright lights dim into disappointing duds?

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The 5 Best Ways to Improve Your Onboarding Program

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New hires are like seeds. At first, they have nothing but potential. The right care will help them flourish, while neglect will ensure that they never reach their full potential. As a hiring manager, it’s your job to make sure this doesn’t happen. Just as the gardener’s job doesn’t end when the seed is planted, your work isn’t over until a new permanent hire has been onboarded.

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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 Am I Missing out on by Not Working with a Recruiter?

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Many people experience a fear of missing out (or FOMO as it’s affectionately called). While it’s usually used to describe social settings, there’s a strain of FOMO that directly affects hiring managers. If you’re responsible for hiring new workers, you may feel apprehensive about the opportunities you’ll lose by forgoing recruitment services. Unlike many strains of FOMO, though, this one is actually valid.

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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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4 Steal-Worthy Tips for Hiring Managers

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Hiring managers have relatively little room for error. When you’re tasked with finding, interviewing, and hiring the best workers for a given role, you have to be on your game. Even if you make all the right moves, a slip-up on someone else’s part can reflect badly on you. This creates a substantial amount of pressure, which can make it even more difficult to do your job right.

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4 Surprising Advantages of Working with a Recruiter

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Hiring is more of an art than a science. Sure, engineers and other technical workers need to have specific skills if they want to find employment, but the best workers go beyond these requirements. They work well with others, practice excellent time management skills, and demonstrate leadership when it’s needed most. You won’t find these employees with a standard job posting. Instead, you’ll need to outsource your recruiting to a dedicated firm if you want to gain access to the best workers.

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When Does It Make Sense to Outsource?

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To outsource or not to outsource, that is the question. Each company has its own unique needs that it must consider before making this decision. While independent contractors can help many companies meet their goals, it’s still difficult to determine whether they represent the best course of action.

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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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How Engineering Recruiters Can Streamline Your Hiring Process

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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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How Hiring Managers Can Become Better at Hiring

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To hire the very best employees, you want to make sure your hiring process is top notch, but doing so can be really difficult. There are so many competing ideas about the best ways for hiring managers to approach hiring.

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Looking to Hire Engineers? Here’s What You Need to Know

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Engineers are always in steady demand, and engineering programs remain some of the most popular university programs in Canada. Every year, new engineers with tremendous skill sets enter the job market looking for employment, alongside other engineers looking for a change of place or position. When you’re looking to hire engineers, there are certain things you should know to ensure you get the best candidates possible.

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Why Every Hiring Manager Should Prioritize Candidate Experience

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There are so many different things to look for in a prospective hire. A great candidate should be well rounded and able to check off multiple boxes. However, when you sit down and come up with a hiring strategy, you’ll find that you need to prioritize certain qualities over others. After all, different candidates will check different boxes, and understanding what you’re looking for and what you value the most in a prospective candidate is important. Here are some reasons why every hiring manager should prioritize candidate experience.

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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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When to Make a Hiring Decision

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While at times it may feel tedious, the hiring process is actually an exciting part of any business. Hiring is a great opportunity for further growth and reinvigoration in the workplace; new employees bring in fresh insight and ideas that can expand your business in ways you couldn’t imagine. As an integral part of any business, knowing when to make hiring decisions is a big part of the equation. Consider this your guide for the best times to make a hiring decision.

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5 Key Metrics Hiring Managers Need to Know

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Key metrics, or quantifiable measures used by businesses to determine and assess their level of success, are an important part of keeping track of your business’s overall health. This is especially true when it comes to hiring—key metrics can help you better understand your hiring process and how it can be improved. The most important thing hiring managers can do is develop a strategic plan for hiring. A successful hiring plan will incorporate these five key metrics:

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Not Sure If You’ve Hired an Employee or an Independent Contractor?

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Correctly classifying workers is much more important than people often realize. The Canadian government strictly enforces proper classification, so it’s important that you know the difference between an employee and an independent contractor. Save yourself the headache: use this handy guide to easily differentiate the two types of workers.

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5 Quick Tips for Tackling the Hiring Process

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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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How to Tell Who The Best Job Candidate Is

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Hiring can be tricky, especially when you are met with numerous candidates who all have great potential, and who have individual strengths that could be a great asset to your business. If only you could offer employment to all the amazing candidates you meet!

Download the essential guide to hiring engineers.

And yet, making difficult decisions is a part of the hiring process. We’re here to help! Consider this your guide for how to tell who the best job candidate is.

Ask the Right Questions

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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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Stressed about IT Staffing? Follow These 3 Tips for Peace of Mind

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Project staffing in IT can be a big challenge for managers. You need to bring on enough contractors to finish the project on time, but not too many. You need to find top-quality contractors, often on short notice.

Managers are tasked with bringing contractor chaos into order, which can be incredibly stressful. However, there are things you can do to make IT staffing less stressful. Here are three tips for peace of mind during the hiring process.

1. Plan Ahead

It can be hard to predict your future staffing needs. Managers don’t always know what projects are on the horizon or when those projects will begin. The trick is to have candidates in mind beforehand. When a project begins, you’ll already know who you can call to join your team.

To do this, build a database of quality IT workers that are open to contract positions. Adding people you’ve interviewed in the past is a good place to start. There are probably candidates who you really wanted to hire, but they couldn’t be offered a position for some reason. Stay in touch with these top candidates, and when you have a last-minute hiring need, they may be able to help.

2. Widen Your Search

When you place an ad on an online job board, you may not reach the best IT workers. There’s no guarantee that talented IT workers will see your posting. Worse, you may get swamped with hundreds of applications from unqualified candidates. To reduce your stress, widen your search, and look in new places for workers.

Job hunters are using new methods to look for jobs, and you can meet them where they are. They’re looking for work on social networking sites, like LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn for recruiting employees, and find people who would’ve never been on your radar otherwise.

Employee referrals are another way to find candidates that may not be on job boards. You already have a lot of talented IT workers on your team, and they probably know a lot of people in the industry. They have old classmates, friends, or past coworkers who also work in IT. Some of these people may be actively looking for work, and your employees can refer them to you.

Employee referral programs can also help you find passive job seekers. Passive job seekers are already employed, but they’re open to new opportunities. When your employees mention that you’re hiring, these passive job seekers may get excited about working on your project.

3. Work with a Staffing Agency

If you’re having trouble finding good IT workers, or if you just don’t have time, consider working with a staffing agency. Not all agencies will be able to provide the high-quality workers you need, so look for a staffing agency that specializes in IT recruitment services. These agencies have expertise in filling IT positions of all kinds, and they can streamline your technical recruitment.

Some agencies have large pools of qualified IT workers. Other agencies can quickly use their connections to find the right workers for their clients. They can find workers that you might not have been able to find on your own. Plus, they can do it more quickly. This means your project can start on time, with the right IT staffing levels.

There’s another big benefit of using staffing agencies for your IT staffing needs: agencies handle the paperwork for contract staff, so that’s one less thing you need to stress about. Employment contracts, time sheets, payroll, and other time-consuming paperwork is all handled by the agency. That means you can focus on the parts of your job that really matter, like making sure the project succeeds.

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4 Secrets to Hire Technical Staff

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Hiring can be a competitive process, especially when you’re looking for top talent. With their specialized skill sets, tech professionals are prized in an increasingly competitive market. As companies invest more and more in tech, there’s a huge demand for talented technical staff—so it’s likely that your favourite candidate is also fielding offers from your competitors.

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5 Recommended Onboarding Tips

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Onboarding is a crucial part of bringing a new hire into the fold. It’s the process by which the new employee is inducted into the workforce and acquires the knowledge and training necessary to perform their job.

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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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7 Interview Best Practices

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Interviewing potential candidates can be a stressful and intimidating experience. Not only does it require interacting with and assessing strangers, but it’s a huge responsibility. The wrong candidate can waste money and energy you don’t have to spare.

In order to make sure that you’re getting the most out of the hiring process, it’s important to adhere to these seveninterview best practices.

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7 Interview Questions to Ask IT Professionals

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A quick Google search will lead you to dozens of lists with must-ask interview questions, but when you’re screening IT professionals, you should be industry-specific. IT professionals have a specialized skill set, so the interview should have a number of pointed questions to reflect that.

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How to Sharpen Your Staffing Process

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When you hire the right people with the right skills, your team gets great work done. When your staffing process is flawed, your company can suffer major consequences. Having an effective and sharpened hiring strategywill attract the right talent who will contribute to your short-term operations and your long-term growth as a business.

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What Is Co-Employment?

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You may have heard the term “co-employment” in various recruiting or hiring circles, but perhaps you’ve never really understood what it means. There is quite a bit of confusion regarding this term, and as a result, there are many people who are fearful of co-employment and unwilling to explore it as a valid option for hiring talent. But that shouldn’t be the case. Understanding what it is, how it works, and what the benefits are will help you make educated decisions about whether or not it’s a valid option for your firm.

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Which of These 5 Engineering Recruiting Mistakes Are You Making?

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Engineering recruiting can be challenging, costly, and time-consuming–like any hiring process. But with the industry’s exponential growth alongside the technological revolution, engineering has become an increasingly in-demand expertise. With this growing need for specialized and experienced engineers, the recruitment process can be risky for developing businesses.

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

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Project staffing can be an especially tricky balancing act. You want to have enough people to do the job right, but you also can’t afford to invest in too many contractors. You have to bring in professionals with the abilities that best suit your end goal, but that means prioritizing certain skills over others. How do you negotiate between what your project needs and the limited resources at your disposal?

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How to Hire Contract Staff More Efficiently

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Adding a new member to your team—even if it’s only temporary—is an exciting time for new innovative ideas, fresh perspectives, and integrating specialized skills into your workplace. The hiring process, however, can be frustrating, costly, and time-consuming. When you’re working to maintain the steady growth of your company, this can be a major strain on your resources. There are a number of benefits when you hire contract staff, so don’t let the staffing process cost you more than it needs to.

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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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Stop Stealing Your Own People! How to Outsource an Entire Project

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Hiring individual contractors is common in today’s engineering industries. Often, you need workers who can complete specialized tasks, but what happens when you have an entire project that you need to bring in on time–and on budget?

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What Do Recruiters Actually Do?

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Though recruiting has recently come to be more important than ever, many people are confused or unaware of what recruiters actually do. On the surface, it seems simple enough: they find people to fill roles. But there is a lot of work that goes into the steps it takes to hire the right talent for the right role … and none of it is simple.

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How to Tell If You Need a Contractor or a Full-Time Hire

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When making hiring decisions, it can be difficult to navigate the difference between contractors and full-time hires, and to know which one is best suited to your needs. Contract workers are becoming an increasingly large part of the workforce—more of a go-to for hiring than ever before. Understanding the differences between the two classifications, the positives and negatives associated with both, and the circumstances under which one might be more appropriate than the other for your business, is essential. Consider this your guide to determining whether you need a contractor or a full-time hire.

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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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Building a killer data science team

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Big Data is the next Big Thing – but before throwing fistfuls of money at big data initiatives, organizations need to make some decisions: Why do analytics – what’s the business case?  What tools should we use? Should we build a team in-house, or hire an outside vendor?

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Will certifications get me a job – or do they matter?

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Whether you’re new to the industry, or switching careers (or specialities) – there are a dizzying number of acronyms: MCSD, SCJD. RHCE, ACSA.  If there is a prominent technology, you’re likely to find a certification program for it … and often it’s the same company selling the product and then touting their certification.

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More women entering engineering, but even more leaving

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There’s good news, and there’s bad news.

First the good: more women are entering engineering – over the last two decades, women accounted for over 20% of all engineering school grads.  The bad news?  Many aren’t staying in the industry.

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Six contractor roles to include on your outage team

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About every 18 months, nuclear power plants must remove spent fuel and replace it with a fresh supply, a process that requires a scheduled outage. These necessary periods of downtime are extremely costly – lost revenue is lost revenue. Additionally, the utility company must contend with the equipment and staffing costs of the outage itself.

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Beyond the Resume: A Case Study

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Turnover hurts. It’s that simple.
There are many direct and indirect costs for all concerned when a new hire doesn’t work out as planned. The opportunity costs of lost matches with better suited prospects is the most important consideration, but that is really just the beginning. Read more

4 Great Recruiting Best Practices from Canada’s Best Workplaces

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Hiring the best talent is as tough as it’s ever been, with projections indicating that for the first time in history, the number of younger workers entering the labor market won’t be enough to replace those who are leaving. However, even though talent is scarce, applications seem plentiful once you post a job online. Thanks to job boards like Indeed and SimplyHired, your posting can be shared with thousands of people in no time.

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The Offer was Declined, Why?

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Terry is a friend and CEO of a $100M company.   He told me a story recently of his excitement and anticipation about an offer he made to a potential executive candidate, but surprisingly, the candidate sheepishly declined the offer.  What happened?   Did his spouse decide that she did not want to move? Did a child object? Perhaps the candidate wasn’t astute enough to reject a ‘damage control’ matching offer from his current employer? I’ve heard this story many times before.

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