Top Tips for Building an Engineering Team

No engineering firm can succeed without the right team in place. Engineering is all about working together and collaborating, so it is vital that you take your time with recruitment to find people that will be a good fit, mesh with one another and help to take your firm to new heights. This is no easy feat, though, especially when it is harder for startups to attract talent than more established firms. So, what can be done about this? Read on for a few tips to keep in mind when building your engineering team that should help you to assemble the A team and find success.

Identify Roles & Needs

The first step to building any kind of team is to establish what needs you have and what roles need to be filled. There is no point in assembling a talented engineering team if you have team members that have the same skillset, so you need to make sure that all of the needs within your team are established so that you can then find the right talent and people with complementary skill sets and knowledge.

Focus On People That Are a Good Fit

When recruiting an engineering team, it is very easy to focus purely on those that have relevant experience and qualifications. While this is certainly useful, you will find that this does not necessarily mean that they are the right person for the job, and you could have issues with conflicting personalities, poor work ethic, or a bad attitude. This is why you should focus on people that will be a good fit, have a strong work ethic, and a good attitude towards work. Even if they do not have a huge amount of experience or lack qualifications, they are likely to be the better options as they have positive attributes that cannot be taught.

Take Your Time with The Interview Process

Leading on from this, the interview process is the key stage when it comes to building an engineering team. This is why you need to carefully plan this stage and think of questions that will help you to determine whether or not the candidate is the right person for the job. You also need to try to make people feel as comfortable as possible so that they can be themselves, relax and give the best possible answers. When it comes to interviewing candidates, you should always go with your gut and general impression of candidates.

Evaluate Technical Skills

Obviously, you will also want to evaluate their technical skills. It will depend on the type of engineering work that you can do, but analyzing a portfolio is one of the best ways to do this. You could also perform a technical screen where they talk with another engineer at the company for an hour or so about technical aspects of the role and/or create coding challenges for them to solve.

Embrace Diversity

All businesses should be embracing diversity and not just for legal and ethical reasons. Having a diverse workforce helps to bring new viewpoints and experiences to your firm; it allows you to improve your brand reputation and have a global impact. It can also help to create a positive, supportive and welcoming workplace culture that should keep your staff happy, motivated and engaged. All aspects of diversity should be embraced, including women in engineering. There are a number of famous female engineers throughout history and can help to address the skills gap and retiring workforce, especially those that have a master’s in engineering management.

Find A Good Balance Between Senior & Junior Staff

Ideally, you will want a good balance between senior and experienced staff and newly qualified engineers. As above, this can bring the best of both worlds and create a healthy system where new staff can learn from more experienced engineers while also bringing fresh ideas and the latest training into the organization. This is also important in terms of future planning as you will always want to think ahead and ensure that your company is staffed by those with enough experience under their belt.

Use A Recruitment Agency

Finding talent for an engineering firm can take a lot of time and energy, which could negatively affect the projects that you are working on. This is why it is a smart idea to use the services of a recruitment agency that specializes in engineering as they will be able to do a lot of the hard work for you and make it easier to find job seekers that might have been otherwise hard to find. These agencies can help to find the best available talent based on your needs and provide advice on recruitment, so they can be incredibly useful when it comes to building your team and finding talent.

Cast A Wide Net

When it comes to recruiting, you always want to find the best talent, and this will require casting a large net. You are limiting yourself if you are only focusing on those that live nearby, so instead, try to look further afield to find a larger pool and greater talent. You may be able to offer a hybrid work model that would make distance much less of an issue as well as cast a much wider net while keeping staff happy by providing a good work-life balance.

Network

Recruitment is just one reason why it is helpful to have a large professional network. When looking to build your team, you may already have people that would be perfect for the job within your professional network, and if not, then there is a good chance that someone knows someone who would be a good fit. This is why you should always look to develop a large professional network and maintain this over time, which is made much easier by social media these days.

Hopefully, the information in this post will help you to build the ideal team for your engineering firm. Every successful engineering firm will be powered by a team of hardworking, talented, and skilled engineers, but it can take some time to find the right talent for the engineering team at your particular firm.