Earlier this year a client came back to us about the maintenance team at its manufacturing site.
We had already placed its new electrical engineer, and now it wanted our help with the mechanical post as well.
Two halves of one team
The business makes products for high street retailers.
It had reorganised its maintenance department, and some of the engineers there had moved across into different roles.
That reorganisation left maintenance with fewer people than it needed.
The client's answer was to bring in two specialists, an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer, and we'd been asked to fill the electrical post first.
We placed someone there the client was happy with.
So when it was time to fill the mechanical vacancy, it asked us to handle that one too.
The post needed filling quickly. On the client's fast-moving production lines machines break down often, and every fault was being shared out among a smaller group of engineers.
The mechanical vacancy was also the trickier of the two. Engineers at that level usually come from an electrical background, or they've become all-rounders who do some of everything.
An all-rounder would have looked fine on paper.
Yet the electrical side was already covered, and what the team lacked was strong mechanical knowledge in somebody comfortable on a modern, busy shop floor.
Finding the mechanical engineer
Our engineering recruitment team wrote the advert, then rewrote it more than once to pull in mechanical people.
Good maintenance engineers get snapped up by other employers, so we got back to every applicant quickly.
When we spoke to applicants, and again at interview, we asked each engineer about the mechanical work they had done themselves, and how recently.
Their answers told us fairly fast who had real mechanical depth and who had mostly been doing electrical jobs with some mechanical work on the side.
Knowing the site from the first search saved a step.
We'd already learned what kind of engineer suited that team, so we weren't starting from a blank brief.
In under four weeks the client had made an offer. The engineer we placed started recently, and the feedback so far has been good.
Fees and the guarantee
Our fee is fixed and agreed before we start, and you only pay when your hire starts. Every placement also carries our three-month replacement and rebate guarantee.
Some clients like to interview each person on the shortlist themselves. Others would sooner leave everything to us until it's time to decide, and we'll work whichever way you prefer.
Clients rarely come back to us for a second hire unless the first one worked out.
That's how this manufacturer came to give us the mechanical role, and why the second search could start from what we'd learned on the first.
Now the site has both specialists, one placed after the other, and the engineers who'd been covering the missing role are back to their own jobs instead of doing two people's work between breakdowns.
Of the clients who give us a first role, 92% across our business come back to us for their next hire.
If your maintenance team is a specialist short, book a call with me and tell me which skills the team is missing.
Or use the green Tell Us About Your Role button to send us the role in about a minute, and we'll come back to you within 20 minutes during UK office hours.
