A business that supplies and services commercial equipment across hospitality and care came to us at the start of the year. They'd lost a field service engineer a few months earlier and hadn't managed to replace him. Not for want of trying, either. They'd advertised themselves, they'd been through other agencies, and four months on they still had nobody.
It was costing them. The engineers they had left were covering the work on overtime, which is expensive and, worse than that, wearing. You can only ask people to do that for so long before they start looking around themselves. Service contracts were slipping as well.
The bit everyone else had skipped
On paper the brief looked ordinary. Field service engineer, commercial equipment, a patch of the country to cover. Fine.
It wasn't ordinary though. What they needed was someone strong on the electrical side, who could read a schematic and a wiring diagram and work out the fault from the drawing instead of swapping parts until it went away. Far fewer people can do that than the job title suggests, and it's why four months of looking had turned up nobody they could use.
Our guess is the earlier attempts stopped at the job title. Take the title at face value and you get engineers who match the title. Plenty of those. None of them right.
What we did instead
We advertised, same as anyone would. The difference came after the applications landed.
Instead of shortlisting on job history, we went after evidence. Every candidate got asked about schematics and diagrams in proper detail. Not "are you comfortable with technical drawings", because everyone says yes to that one. More like, talk me through the last fault you diagnosed off a drawing. What was the drawing? What did it tell you? What did you do next?
Plenty of people couldn't answer that well, so we turned them down. Quite a few, including some who looked strong on paper and would have sailed through a lighter screen.
Which left us with a shortlist of one. One. That isn't a typo, and it isn't normally something we'd be pleased about.
Why one turned out to be the right number
A shortlist of one makes clients nervous, and fair enough. It can look like we couldn't be bothered. Normally you want three or four so there's something to compare against.
But the brief was tight, and padding a shortlist with people who don't meet it isn't a service. It just moves the rejecting from us to you, and burns a fortnight of your time doing it. We'd rather send one person we're sure about and tell you straight why there's only one.
They interviewed him and tested him properly, which we'd expected them to. Technical questions, drawings, the lot. He came through it comfortably and got the job.
That was the real check on our screening as much as on him. If we'd read the brief wrong, their testing would have found it out in an afternoon and we'd have been back to square one with nothing to show for four weeks.
Start to finish ours took about four weeks. They'd been at it four months.
What the specialist bit actually was
Nothing clever, honestly. No secret database. Nobody got headhunted out of a competitor in a dramatic phone call.
It came down to spotting that this wasn't a standard engineer job and then screening like it mattered. We asked harder questions, and we were willing to turn down good candidates for being the wrong sort of good. Then we had to go back to the client with one name on the list and explain why. A generalist working off the job title would have sent over a stack of perfectly decent field service engineers, and they'd still be interviewing now.
If you've got an engineering role that keeps producing near misses, that's usually the shape of it. The advert describes the job well enough. It doesn't describe the thing that makes someone able to do it.
Got one sitting open? Tell us about it and we'll give you a straight view on why it isn't filling.
