Staffing Plan for Hiring 20 Bilingual Engineers

Overview of the Hiring Challenge

Our office is currently faced with a significant challenge: we must recruit top talent despite a relatively limited pool of qualified individuals in the immediate area. These new recruits must be capable of fulfilling the requirements for twenty newly created bilingual engineer positions. The candidates must be highly qualified and ready to hit the ground running, and we have only an eight-month framework for recruiting and orienting them. Our firm will therefore need to extend its hiring reach outside the immediate area and launch an intensive recruiting campaign for top talent. This effort will ideally begin in the Southwest region, near universities and urban hubs of technical talent where there is likely to be a larger pool of applicants with fluency in both Spanish and English — candidates who have the education and experience needed for this new company venture.

Creating a more diverse image for our company is a foundational component of this new initiative. We must develop a more inclusive organizational persona through a reconfigured website and updated promotional materials. As Weyland (2011) notes, "How the company presents itself will indicate the cultural norms, whether it is on the website, in job adverts, or at recruitment fairs. In this day and age, the website is the starting point for most applicants. This is an ideal opportunity for organizations to convey which behaviors and working principles are important to the business." Emphasizing our diversity and cultural sensitivity programs, our commitment to bilingual fluency, and our desire for employees with a high level of cultural competence are all ways to better attract the top recruits with the skills we require.

Building a Diverse Employer Brand

Recruitment efforts must be targeted rather than broadly general. Attracting engineering graduates from institutions such as the University of Arizona, Rice University, and other schools with strong engineering programs is a vital component of the recruitment plan. We may also wish to consider recruiting international candidates from Spanish-speaking countries. Rather than advertising open positions through general employment web portals, we will likely need to solicit candidates from specialized sources — such as executive recruitment firms that focus on engineers — given the highly technical demands of these positions.

Targeted Recruitment Strategies

When recruiting international employees in particular, cross-cultural considerations must not be overlooked. Weyland (2011) cautions that employees moved from one location to another "may not only need to learn new skills and knowledge to go with a new role but would likely benefit from some cultural awareness training. Many skills are global; however, country-specific cultural practices continue to shape working environments." Even candidates recruited from domestic campuses and other firms will need to be oriented in our organizational culture, and ideally their personalities should mesh with the atmosphere of our office. All new employees must be receptive to working in an adaptive, open environment grounded in dialogue and demanding high-level communication skills.

Candidate Selection and Structured Interviews

Interviews should be highly structured and targeted, given the specific skills demanded of these engineers. Research has shown that "structured interviews (systematic, patterned interrogation with a specific set of questions) demonstrate a substantially higher validity than unstructured interviews" (Wright & Domagalski, 2010). Structured interviews may take the form of standard questions about the position, or may use hypothetical "what if" scenarios that require prospective employees to demonstrate critical thinking. Since the recruits are engineers being hired for their problem-solving capabilities, the latter method is preferred.

Although interviews are structured, they should still probe candidates to reveal both intangible qualities and highly specific work-related proficiencies. Google has long been noted for its iconoclastic approach to the interview process. "For years, Google's most famous and feared hiring strategy was asking applicants questions that were seemingly impossible to answer, like, 'How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane?' and 'How many gas stations are in Manhattan?'" (Lapowsky, 2013). While some employers rely on personality or cognitive tests (Taylor, 1998), Google places less emphasis on data-driven metrics such as GPA and transcripts, instead attempting to determine whether the candidate is a good fit for the company culture.

Finally, before speaking with candidates, interviewers themselves should be briefed so they can present a positive and welcoming view of the firm. Each representative of the company is a "potential ambassador" to new recruits (Yamamura, Birk, & Cossitt, 2010, p. 59), and the interview itself is an integral part of the overall recruitment process.