We were already working with a privately owned construction and engineering firm in the South East on a couple of other roles when one of their structural engineers resigned. No notice. He was there on the Friday and the team was a person short on the Monday.
Being mid-way through other work for them turned out to matter. We knew the office, we knew how they made decisions, and we didn't have to spend the first week learning any of it. On an urgent job that first week is most of what you've got.
Two things pulling against each other
The first was simply speed. There was a hole in the team from day one and work that didn't stop to accommodate it.
The second was that the job still needed a particular skill set. Urgency makes people reach for whoever can start soonest, and the person who can start soonest is very rarely the right one. A structural engineer who can't do the specific work in front of them is not a stopgap. They're a second vacancy waiting to happen, and by then you've lost another two months.
The salary made it harder again. The client was upfront that it sat in the middle of the range rather than the top, which is fair enough and a lot more useful than pretending otherwise. It does narrow the field though, and the office isn't in a large town, so the number of people who were both right and reachable was never going to be large.
What we did about it
Before advertising anything we worked out who was actually available at that money in that area. Not who existed. Who would realistically move for it, given where they'd have to travel and what they were probably on already.
That sounds like an obvious step and it's the one most often skipped. Skip it and you spend three weeks talking to people who were never going to say yes, which on a role like this is three weeks you haven't got.
Then we moved quickly, and we found somebody almost straight away.
He wasn't right, so we started again
On paper he was fine. Once we'd got properly into it, though, neither we nor the client were confident he was the one.
The tempting thing at that point is to talk yourself into him. The gap is still there, everybody wants it closed, and the second search will cost you time you'd rather not spend. Plenty of agencies would have pushed.
We ran it again instead. This time we put testing into the process rather than relying on the interview alone, on the basis that if we'd misjudged someone once we could just as easily do it twice. The testing wasn't elaborate. It was a way of making the candidate show us the thing the job actually needed rather than describe it. Asking someone to show you and asking them to tell you produce different answers more often than you would think. The second candidate came through it properly and got the job.
Start to finish it took about four weeks, and that includes running the whole thing twice. He started and the team was back to full strength.
Why a specialist mattered
Nothing clever was involved. It came down to two unglamorous decisions.
One was doing the availability work before advertising instead of after. That's what made four weeks possible with a false start in the middle of it.
The other was being willing to say the first candidate wasn't right, when saying nothing would have been easier and would still have earned the fee. A hire made in a hurry that doesn't last isn't a fast placement. It's the same vacancy again in four months, only now the team has covered the gap twice and nobody is keen to do it a third time.
If you're suddenly short and you've got an engineering role that can't wait, the honest question isn't how fast an agency can send CVs. It's whether they'll tell you when one of them is wrong.
Short a person right now? Tell us about it and we'll be straight with you about how it looks.
