The father of applicant testing is… Thomas Edison?
“What is the weight of air in a room 20 x 30 x 10?” sounds like a brainteaser question ripped from a present-day tech interview. It’s actually one of the estimated 160 questions Thomas Edison crafted and...
Why Is It So Hard to Hire a Female Engineer?
Increasing diversity in the workforce and among STEM jobs, in particular, is a priority for many organizations. It’s also a significant challenge for hiring managers – despite the dozens of national programs and millions of dollars spent on...
5 Traits of Exceptional Engineering Managers
Case studies on exceptional leaders are abundant – but specific, and narrow in scope. Rather than distill what makes a great manager through the lens of a specific individual, we asked engineers of all stripes to share what the best managers do...
Find the Right Engineering Candidate … through Patents?
If there was ever an example of a prolific patent-holder in pop culture, it’s Hubert J. Farnsworth — the doddering, bespeckled professor from “Futurama” who invents an outlandish gadget every episode. Professor Farnsworth represents plenty of...
Cutting through the Noise: 7 Ways to Reach Candidates you Need
We don’t have to tell you competition for engineering talent is fierce. Last year our hiring trends survey uncovered only 15% of human resource professionals were “very confident” in their organization’s ability to find and hire the...
Winning Job Descriptions: 6 Notable Examples
We’ve crawled into the EngineerJobs.com vault, pushing past the spider webs and old computer parts — steadily ignoring the weird hum coming from the corner — all so we could bring you some examples of...
Matt Blumberg on Hiring, Finding Senior Talent, and the CEO’s Role in Recruitment
“Why would you ever settle for less than an A player in every role?” Every company dreams of hiring only all-stars and having a vast rolodex of eager, exceptional talent ready to go to work when...
21 Quotes on Hiring and Managing Talent
More than just the heart of a story or an interview; a good quote can get to the essence of things. They convey maximum meaning with a minimum of words. Here are 21 exceptional quotes on hiring and...
4 Good Reasons to Post All Your Jobs
“I’m going to run this one job posting and see how it goes.” You’re not alone if you’ve had this thought or even run your jobs with this in mind. You figure that you’ll run...
No One is Going to Use Your Career Page (Unless You Read This)
Most career pages are – in a word – underwhelming. They’re an afterthought on many corporate sites (or at least they look that way). But why does that matter? Your career page is a first impression. It’s the gateway to your...
3 Studies that Will Make Your Hiring Smarter
There are dozens of articles produced every day that promise to make recruiting effortless, one-click, and painless. The reality is… recruiting and hiring are hard. Especially if you value the caliber of talent you’re bringing into your...
7 Critical Hiring Questions Every Interviewer Should Ask
As an interviewer your job is to get to know a candidate, understand their experience, and assess whether they are a good fit for your team and business in, oh, about an hour or less. That’s no small...
The Power of RPO: What Engineering Businesses Don’t Know they Need
While working with a medium sized R&D organization, Drew Johnson realized that the company’s recruiting needs couldn’t be solved through typical staffing or contingency models. The company’s limited bandwidth for recruiting led Johnson, the principal...
5 Rules to Writing Better Job Ads
The hair at the nape of your neck is damp from all of those anxious department managers breathing on it… not to mention the 15 emails, 12 voicemails, and 1 strongly worded Post-It note waiting...
Petroleum Engineer Hiring Down 32.4%
Nationally, Petroleum Engineering job advertisements were down 32.4% January 2015 compared to January 2014. Petroleum was a singular outlier among all engineering disciplines, which were up a little over 9% in number of job ads vs...
Engineering Jobs Report
When the jobs report came out Friday morning everyone, including Twitter, the stock market, and even Mr. Data Journalism himself – Nate Silver – went bananas. Pretty good jobs report, and by “pretty good” I mean “very...
5 Ways Recruiting Engineers is Different
Many moons ago, long before I came to work for EngineerJobs.com, I was employed by an internet startup company. We worked long hours for decent pay, generous stock options, and ran on adrenaline and ignorance...
Are you an Employer of Choice?
Supply and demand for engineering talent weighs heavily in favor of engineers for most disciplines in the US and Canada. Engineers are in demand, at times commanding enormous salaries, and thus can afford to be choosy about...
Mark Your Calendar: Maker Faire
Ever get into a recruiting event rut? This year, consider adding Maker Faire to your itinerary — it could change the way you think about engineers. There are two large Maker Faires in the United States...
Qualifications or Experience – Which is More Important?
With many different combinations of qualifications and experience present in every resume a recruiter may see – how on earth do we choose the best to call for interview? Or decide who was the best...
How to Take Advantage of the January Talent Gold Rush
This week, aside from being the first week back at work after the holidays, is also notable for one phenomenon in particular: more people will look for a new job this week – or, to be more...
The Twelve Engineers of Christmas
On the brink of the holiday break, mountains of work loom large before anyone can leave the office and enjoy a week of overindulgence and gift-wrapping bliss. Your brain is probably already on vacation. That’s...
Why Some Job Posts Work… and Others Don’t.
You’ve been dangling the hook in the water for weeks now, and you’ve got the sunburn to prove it. Unfortunately, all you’ve managed to net are a handful of nibbles, a small fish or two,...
What does a Merger or Acquisition Mean for HR?
Mergers and acquisitions can instill fear and dread into the very best managers. I have been involved in the world of organizational change management for almost 20 years, the majority of which have been in...
Conversations with engineer candidates: Get ready for a (pleasant) surprise!
Recruiters likely prepare for a few awkward conversations at an undergraduate design presentation or college job fair. Lengthy technical explanations that feel more like classroom lectures than ice-breakers have been an easy fallback for future...
1 Simple Way to Boost Job Applications
One of the most frequent questions we receive from employers is how to to increase the number of applications they receive. The drop-off after viewing the job description to clicking through and completing the application process...
Let’s Talk About the Canadian Engineering Talent Gap
Canada was lucky to ride out the impact of the global financial crisis of the past decade relatively unscathed. Compared with many other leading economies our recession period was shorter and shallower with a strong...
Tech Talent: What HR Needs to Know.
When you work in the technology sector, you soon realize that there is a constantly evolving marketplace for those skills you spent the last few years developing. But this also means those skills will quickly...
Most Popular Engineering Jobs: October 2014
Studying the success of others can be an important tool to your own progress. So we dug through our analytics and rounded up the 10 Most Popular Engineering Jobs in October of 2014 (measured by raw pageviews...
Are you Tracking Source of Hire?
Regardless of department, most business processes can be broken down to: Goals > Tactics > Deliverables In the context of Human Resources, “deliverables” are obtaining and retaining the talent your organization needs to propel the company forward. But “goals”...
Succession Planning for Engineering Talent
Succession planning is hard. But before we talk about the challenges, let’s define what we mean by succession and succession planning – the plans put in place for a person or persons who have been identified to take...
Women engineers don’t look to recruiters, they look to the ‘good old girls’
When an experienced engineer looks to further her career, she looks to friends and mentors, said Christine Valle, director of the Women in Engineering program for the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Engineering as a whole...
3 Ways to Avoid Wasting Money on Job Ads
“Let’s See How this One Job Goes…” At least once a week a well-intentioned, thrifty hiring manager calls – intrigued about reaching an audience made exclusively of engineers in the United States and Canada – and submits a...
Where are the Engineering Job Seekers?
On a quarterly basis we identify where the jobs are for our engineers, breaking down job demand by volume and filtering by location and discipline. But where, exactly, is the engineering talent looking for new jobs located? Knowing which geographies are exporting engineering...
Don’t Wait to Recruit Entry-Level Engineers
Labor Day has passed, summer is over, and most of us, suffering vacation hungover after the long weekend, are easing back into work mode. Slowly. Don’t. If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager hoping to place entry-level engineers next summer, now is the...
7 Things Engineers Want Recruiters and Employers to Know
The research uncovered in our 2014 Engineer Hiring Trends report pointed to a considerable gap between what engineers want and what recruiters and employers think they want. Since “74% of surveyed human resource professionals stated that engineers are the most challenging position to...
Who are the Summertime Engineering Job Seekers?
If you’re a recruiter or work in human resources, we don’t have to tell you the summer months tend to be… slow… for hiring. Basking in the sun on vacation has a way of making experienced...
Vacation is Mandatory: Mental Health, Productivity, and Why Your Employees Need to Unplug
Only one-third of summer, that 98-day window bookended by Memorial Day and Labor Day in the US, remains. Have your employees taken a vacation yet? Have you encouraged them to?
Most Popular Engineering Jobs: June 2014
Studying the success of others can be an important tool to your own progress. So we dug through our analytics and rounded up the 10 Most Popular Engineering Jobs in June of 2014 (measured by raw...
43 Tools, Tips & Posts to Increase Your Employer Brand
How do you increase your employer brand? It’s a question every internal recruiter is asking themselves on a daily basis; particularly in growth industries where talent is in short supply. Universum recently researched “the Most Coveted Employers...
Tip: Boost Employee Engagement with Blind Biographies
Looking for a fresh idea to boost engagement and encourage conversation between your employees? This tip comes to us from Tom Jonjak, Director of Staffing at engineering consulting firm bb7. Company Growth Can Lead to Increasing...
How to Hire & Retain Top Engineering Talent: 5 Perspectives
We are big believers in the wisdom of crowds, so we talked to 5 human resource professionals actively involved in hiring for their perspective on how to hire and retain top engineering talent. Interviewed are: Jeremy Bennett, Vice...
2014 Engineer Hiring Trends [Infographic]
Engineers have a reputation for being difficult to find – and even more difficult to recruit and ultimately hire. Numerous articles have pointed out what our gut has long told us – there are more available jobs for engineers than experienced...
Why Engineers Aren’t Applying to Your Job
You already know that it’s hard to find good engineers. And you may already know that finding them through classified advertising is even tougher. But what you may not know is that your ads could...