Engineers design and develop the vital structures companies use to create products or systems to drive a business. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the occupation is growing faster than the average job, with more demand than supply of engineers.
In short, applicants for your job can be choosy, so it’s up to you to provide an offer they won’t want to refuse.
In this blog, we’ll teach you how to attract and hire talented and diverse engineers and how to create a plan to retain the top workers you’ve hired.
Why Employers Are Bringing Diverse Engineers Into the Workplace
Diversity and inclusion have been buzzwords for nearly two decades. While the seeds were planted with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the move from theory to practice has only gained more visibility recently.
Even with federal reforms against sexual harassment in the workplace evolving into anti-discrimination laws, it’s still a challenge to enforce these rules when the work environment is predominantly homogeneous.
To combat this concern proactively, professional organizations such as the National Society of Professional Engineers established standards for inclusivity and diversity within engineering teams.
The goal is to ensure that hiring processes are:
- Objective
- Measurable
- Free of bias
Diversity vs. Exclusivity in Engineering Teams
Studies have consistently shown that teams of people from diverse backgrounds (color, gender, age, values, education, or other differences) lead to better company results and innovative outcomes. These varying perspectives offer views that might not be possible with a more homogeneous team.
In engineering, particularly tech, innovation is vital to a company’s success. Diverse teams can generate conflict, but it becomes constructive when it is tied to the same goal for everyone. However, the same type of conflict within a less diverse group often leads to tension, with people possessing minority voices and backgrounds feeling attacked.
Employers who value high-performing teams with out-of-the-box thinking understand the role of diversity within their company. Due to our backgrounds and experiences, we all have unconscious natural biases. Rather than using these biases to destroy productivity, inclusivity brings a team together, offering instructive thoughts that foster cutting-edge ideas.
The challenge to this goal is a discrepancy in engineering graduates, with only 20% female and a disparate underrepresentation of ethnic and racial diversity in the field.
If you want to hire the top minds and ensure a diverse representation on your team, you need to know how to attract and retain them. The following steps come into play in your hiring protocols.
1. Plan and Prepare the Role
Engineers undergo extensive training to achieve the skills they have. This knowledge can be intimidating for many hiring managers.
Whether you’re new to hiring or a seasoned expert, candidate sourcing is always the first obstacle. Your typical streams, like LinkedIn and Indeed, will bring applicants to your inbox. Still, if your goal includes a focus on diversity, you’ll be spending valuable time weeding out the candidates that don’t fit your definition.
However, if you use hiring pipelines dedicated to a diverse pool of talent, such as Obsid® —the largest job board and network designed for Black tech professionals—you know the applicants who make it through the screening process are skilled and qualified candidates. Obsidi® Recruit connects you to its network of 100,000+ Black tech professionals, instantly eliminating the guesswork out of your resume scanning.
Preparing to Interview Candidates For a Diverse, Challenging Role
How do you interview someone to ensure they have the skills for the job when you aren’t an engineer?
The first question is why your company needs to hire someone in this role. Just as a healthcare facility wouldn’t choose a general physician if it needed a heart surgeon, you want to ensure the candidate you select has the appropriate skills to do the job you’re hiring.
- Tech
- Civil
- Electrical
- Mechanical
- Chemical
- Industrial
This part doesn’t require detailed engineering knowledge. Start by determining your business’s short—and long-term goals and how the engineer’s role integrates with them.
Consider how your needs may change over the next few years and how the engineer’s job is included in those evolutions. Will the role start as part-time, with the potential of moving into full-time later? Who will your new team member work with, and what kind of diversity would best enhance that department?
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Setting the Scene to Attract Diverse Talent
Use these goals to design the role to attract those with the appropriate skill set and BIPOC characteristics. Be prepared to share your strategies to advance your company, including financials. Top engineers want to know they’re working for a company that might not be in the limelight yet, but they have the ideas and expansion strategy to get there.
Include the technology the engineer will use and evidence of how your company is on the cutting edge of the industry. Compare your position to similar jobs in your area and prepare the salary and benefits you can offer. You want the package to be competitive but flexible enough to be open to negotiation if necessary.
Lastly, decide whether to implement your job posting using job boards, a staffing company, or word-of-mouth referrals. Each recruiting process option has pros and cons, but they’re all standard methods for finding good engineers. When it comes to choosing diverse talent, you may need to educate your hiring managers that they need to seek outside of their regular pipeline. Through events and webinars that cater to audiences that are BIPOC, such as those offered by Obsidi®, your company will have greater visibility and access to the talent you’re searching for.
2. Investigate the Engineering Position
While interviewing candidates, you want to sound knowledgeable about the opening. This is the part where you educate yourself on:
- What an engineer does
- How they think
- What they may want in a career
This may mean taking a few days to talk to your current engineers, asking them what’s involved in their jobs, and using their expertise to learn what to include in your interviews. Dig into the engineers’ responsibilities, learn the lingo, and adjust your mindset to think like a recruiter.
Check job boards to see how inundated the job market is with open positions and how other companies recruit qualified candidates.
What a Strong Potential Candidate Offers
Engineers generally incorporate high-level science and math to reach a real-world goal. As they are given a problem to solve, they design, build, test, and tweak systems. They include safety, practical, cost, and regulatory requirements throughout the process.
The right engineer won’t be a “yes” person.
They’ll explain why an idea will or won’t work to prevent time, cost, or safety issues down the line. As you learn from those already in the role and interview candidates, you’ll recognize that the ideal person has a mix of hard and soft skills that enable them to communicate their thoughts and findings to others on the team.
3. Prepare For the Interview
Even if you’re in a hurry to get started on your project, the interview process for an engineer should be slow and thorough. Try to avoid hiring in a rush. Hiring the wrong person for the job can save you more time and money than you would have used to be patient.
Finding the top engineering talent right for your company can be time-consuming, but thoroughness pays off.
See also: 9 Ways to Reduce Interview Bias
Establishing Interview Questions and Processes
Develop open-ended questions that meet the skills you’re looking for and determine what a good response should include. Use your team to do this and research common engineering interview questions if necessary.
You may want to develop a rubric that includes diversity considerations and preferred responses to score the candidates’ interviews quickly as you talk to them. With a rubric, you can underline the points the interviewee covers and take notes to refer to later while evaluating responses.
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Essential Factors to Keep in Mind While Interviewing Engineers
Every interview process will look different, making it challenging to have expectations before a meeting. Variables will change on the part of the candidates.
However, you can ensure as much consistency as possible as you compare interviews by keeping these factors in mind:
- Ask each candidate the same questions. This not only makes it fair, but you know you’re comparing apples to apples.
- In addition to questioning, look for soft skills such as personality traits that mesh with your current team and your goals, judgment, and potential biases.
- Keep your biases out of the interview. This reminder is especially crucial when you’re hiring diverse engineers. We all have natural biases that can skew us in favor of one person over another.
- Stay away from unnecessarily hard questions and keep focused on talent and knowledge.
Interviewing engineers will look different depending on the position, industry, and goals. Yet, these tips apply to any company and any candidate.
Consult your company’s ERG, and DEI lead if you have those support mechanisms and resources. Your ERG and DEI team members can guide you by providing further insights, knowledge, and enriching perspectives that can aid in adopting proper inclusive language and implementing better diversity-mindful interview practices and approaches that reflect the rich backgrounds and experiences of the candidates you may encounter. They can also sit in on the interview to speak to diverse candidates. Having someone who looks like your applicants and can engage with them regarding their varied experiences in your company can drive the point home and attract top talent.
(If you don’t have an ERG group yet, this is a great way to ensure you’re including diversity in healthy ways. An Employee Resource Group, or ERG, is a voluntary team of employees who actively work to create a more diverse, inclusive workplace. These can also be called business resources, network groups, or affinity groups.)
The ideal hire for a role this vital has the technical and developer knowledge essential for the job. However, their personality and soft skills will mesh well with your current team, eliminating any potentially unnecessary drama or interpersonal issues.
4. Showcase Your Company Culture in the Interview
Your compensation package might not rival a mega organization’s, but if your positive company culture is attractive to the engineers, they may prefer to work for you.
When it comes to a job like engineering, where the demand outweighs the supply, you can expect that you and your company are also being “interviewed.” How you come across as the hiring manager matters.
You are the first real introduction to how the company treats others.
Checking for Alignment With Your Company’s Values
Within the interview process, the candidate should feel that you care about your team and that personal lives, diverse perspectives, and individual needs are valued.
At the same time, you’re evaluating their values to see how they align with the company’s. If the overarching mission is based on teamwork and integrating ideas, and the candidate prefers to work alone, there may be a conflict.
Since your goal is to hire a diverse team, address how your company’s stance on engaging various perspectives is essential to the overall atmosphere. Do you, as the business representative, have a reputation as a contributor to its culturally diverse workforce?
Put Yourself in Their Shoes
Those in underrepresented groups in engineering often feel pressure to conform or compete on a higher level. The fact that your company prizes open communication and offers regular feedback can encourage the candidate to feel safe on your team.
Finally, discuss the growth opportunities that occur regularly within your business. These may be team-building, socializing, or professional learning events. Include photos or other evidence of your company’s members at professional development conferences celebrating diversity, like Obsidi®’s BFUTR Global Tech Summit – the most prominent Black tech conference globally. This signals and communicates to your candidates that they will continue to grow and thrive and can be authentically themselves in their positions naturally without pushback from the employer.
Prepare your ERG leadership statistics, showcasing how diversity in your company looks in various positions.
Share how achievements are recognized and highlight the positive aspects of working for a company that embraces diversity.
Remember that not every employer offers growth opportunities or encourages constructive differences of opinion. What you see as a regular part of the job could be what pushes a candidate to accept your offer over one from another company without an inclusive atmosphere.
Conclusion
Recruiting engineers for a diverse team requires a unique interview process that includes soft and technical skills. Whether you’re a startup or your brand is well known, you want the candidate experience to be positive.
The best engineers can choose to be picky about the role they select, and your job posting and interviews should be designed to attract the top engineering candidates.
Once you hire your new hire, follow through on your promises and regularly reaffirm that the engineer is an excellent cultural fit.
Use these tips as you make your hiring decisions, and your company will soon have access to a talent pool of diverse, great engineers!
Get started with Obsidi®, the job board and global network that connects highly skilled Black tech professionals with employers of choice.
