Recruiting For a lot of companies, many jobs involve the performance of highly-specialized tasks. For Savannah Engineering, Inspection and Insurance Company (SEIIC), there is a need for highly-trained engineers and technical personnel. These employees need to have either a high level of formal training (usually in engineering), a lot of experience in the industry, or both. Because of the high degree of specialization in the field, it is a highly competitive environment to find these types of employees. The industry is growing, or at the very least SEIIC wishes to grow, and that requires not only retaining employees, but finding more. Thus, SEIIC needs to have a recruitment strategy that will allow it to meet its talent needs on an ongoing basis.

Techniques

There are a number of means by which companies can attract and retain such engineering and technical talent. One of the issues with respect to recruiting engineers is that they require a certain amount of formal education in the field as a baseline -- it is impossible to simply hire a smart person off the street and train them in the basics of engineering; candidates must already possess this background. As such, the pool of potential employees is constrained, and in many markets it is entirely conceivable that demand outstrips supply. Thus, the first step is to build a competitive package -- a candidate is unlikely to consider a company that does not start with a competitive compensation package. The first step, therefore, is to understand what a competitive package looks like.

Employees today, especially younger ones, are oriented towards a total benefits package. They look at their employment in a holistic way -- seeking pay, benefits, working conditions and opportunity. If anything, pay and benefits are the easiest thing for a company to provide. They are what Herzberg would have referred to as hygiene factors -- they have to be competitive within the context of the local marketplace in order for a candidate to even consider a company. Engineers in particular are more or less comfortable that they will be able to earn a decent living from their work -- the bigger issues are the motivating factors, which as achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, opportunity for advancement and growth (Knight & Westbrook, 1999). This is doubly the case in situations where there is a shortage of labor. So while it is important that SEIIC offers pay and benefits at least in line with the competition, this is a baseline factor that gets the company into the game; it will not help the company be genuinely attractive unless the benefits and pay are notably superior to what the competition is offering. There is some disagreement about this -- in particular some studies have found that the compensation package is itself a factor in motivation (Igalens & Roussel, 1999) but there is a reasonable argument to be made that this is not the case for younger workers, nor for people whose skill set buys them a strong compensation package by default. It may take some research to fully understand the competitive landscape, but this step is essential for getting SEIIC to the starting line.

Once a baseline of pay and benefits has been established -- and how competitive this needs to be is dependent on how competitive the marketplace is -- the next step is to look after key issues of work environment and opportunities for advancement. Before worrying about these issues too much, SEIIC needs to determine what the target market for its recruiting efforts is, because how the company approaches this issue differs significantly if it is seeking experienced employees or millennials. Millennials have different values that older employees, and that is reflected in what they respond to in terms of recruiting efforts. Recruiting millennials requires understanding their value systems. For one, they are less oriented by money, especially in the short run. Money is always nice, but the real motivation comes from Herzberg's motivating factors, especially work environment and opportunity. In general, this is a generation that rejects formality, and embraces true meritocracy. They wish to be in an environment where if they do well, they will be rewarded for that. The old ideas about paying dues and biding time are not attractive to people for whom such a system will put them at a disadvantage for the next twenty years. If they have the skills, they desire to be in an environment where those skills will be put to good use, and where rewards will be based on abilities...

First, a company needs to have specific job descriptions, albeit ones that allow for employees to create their own opportunities. The most progressive companies actually allow employees a percentage of their work time for pet projects, though this seems out of line with the strategic objectives and business model of SEIIC. The specific job descriptions allow for performance to be quantified, and within that for employees to be measured against historical data. Employees who routinely outperform expectations are therefore in the best position to receive promotions, though criteria for promotions will generally be based on excellence at specific attributes that are required for the next level up, so as to avoid the Peter Principle in action.
If the company is seeking to recruit younger engineers and new graduates, it needs to be online. Most recruiting is done online, but the recruiting website needs to be specifically oriented towards selling the company -- if the best people are not applying to the company that speaks to a problem with the site itself. The site needs to convey not only the benefits and total compensation package, but also the employer brand. The company needs to be focused on building the brand it wishes to convey, and those brand attributes need to be attractive to the employees that the company is seeking (Ambler & Barrow, 1996). The brand should reflect the company, but also be reflected in the compensation, and it should be very obvious from the website how the company is seeking to position itself as an employer.

One best practice with respect to the employer brand, is that the employees must live the employer brand. One thing about recruiting -- whatever you promise on the website needs to be in evidence when recruits visit the facilities. The modern candidate is well aware that recruiters rely on puffery and double-speak, and they need to see and feel that the promises that are being made are true. That means that the employees, and in particular the employees that recruits are likely to see, believe in the vision of the company that is being sold to candidates, and that they embody that (Maxwell & Knox, 2009). Otherwise, good candidates will be unconvinced at best, and take a cynical view of the company at worst.

Another aspect of recruiting is simply looking in the right place for workers. The traditional college recruiting session still exists, but is not the best way to reach the best candidates -- everything is done online. That, however, is not as straightforward as it might seem; cyberspace is not a singular place. The company will need to find the right places in cyberspace in which to recruit, and furthermore will need to attract star candidates to their company recruiting site. The latter may require taking out ads in order to get exposure. Thankfully such ads can be targeted, but the flip side is that a company taking out ads might be seen as less desirable. An effective ad can, however, disparage that notion and simply present the company as being savvy.

Ultimately, however, the company needs to go where the talent is. If the company is recruiting experienced workers, that might mean having a specific strategy to identify quality candidates either at rival companies or companies in other industries. To do this, it will need to know where good workers come from -- an internal analysis of where the company's existing best employees come from is important, because this provides the baseline data from which the company can determine where the best places to look in the future are. Particular attention should be paid to areas that the company has perhaps not yet tapped out.

Conclusions

Modern recruiting requires a few different elements. First, the company needs to build its employer brand. This is essential to the company attracting eyeballs to its recruiting website. There may be a lot of quality in the unsolicited applications, and any such application is basically found money anyway, so it is worth ensuring that as many unsolicited applications as possible come through -- software can parse them for high quality candidates at a low cost. The company also needs to ensure that its employees live the employer brand that is has created. Current employees are among the best advocates for the company going forward, so it is important that they are aware of their role as advocates for the company and pieces of…