Market Conditions in 2012 & Recruiting the Best

2012 is shaping up to be a year that will bring with it both challenges and opportunities for the engineering employer. Challenges can be grouped into cost based and quality.

 

The biggest recruitment cost in 2012 will not be a one off agency fee but the opportunity cost incurred by senior members of a company's staff who will be involved in the recruitment process. Rather than spending time on core responsibilities that directly influence bottom line profits, they will be dragged away to interview and process the multitude of applications from candidates who will never even work for the company. An unfortunate effect of the mass redundancies of recent years is the number of unsuitable applicants to any advertised role has multiplied, and therefore, so have the screening costs.

 

The biggest quality issue appears to go hand in hand with cost - it's simply finding the best candidate on the market. Candidates who appear strong on paper may be the exact opposite when you meet them and vice versa. The best engineers don't always write the best CV's and weaker candidates are involving third parties to produce a first class CV in an increasingly competitive employment market.

 

You may be forgiven for thinking that so far the horizon looks bleak, but 2012 does also bring opportunities. By recruiting and retaining the best engineers, competitive advantages will both be built and crystallised.

 

Luton Bennett has been established to maximise the opportunities that the future brings and minimise the challenges for the engineering employer. Our 2 step approach is one of high efficiency where we pass on our cost savings to you. Our specialist method of pre-screening and interviewing candidates effectively means that we spend less of our own time and money in the sourcing process than other recruiters. Secondly, we only take on roles that we are very confident that we can fill and so we don't have the volume of aborted assignments that inevitably push up the average assignment cost that our competitors face.

 

12 years of specialist engineering recruitment has taught our director team methods of identifying the best candidates that recruiting managers so often put down to 'gut feel'. We use a long term approach to identifying the best person for any given job which means that engineers are retained. This again yields obvious benefits towards cost effectiveness. We are so confident in our ability to find the best candidates that we are also able to offer a fantastic guarantee period with each applicant that we place.