When an Engineering Vacancy Becomes Urgent, the Recruitment Usually Gets Harder

Availability Starts Driving the Decision

When there is time to recruit properly, an employer can concentrate on finding the person who best matches the role, the team and the longer-term requirements of the business. When the vacancy becomes urgent, availability suddenly moves much higher up the list. Can they interview tomorrow? Can they start on Monday? Are they immediately available? Those are perfectly reasonable questions, but they aren’t necessarily the same as asking whether somebody is actually the right engineer for the job.

The strongest candidate may have a month’s notice to give their current employer, they may be finishing another contract or they might need a little flexibility around an existing commitment. If the requirement is urgent enough, those candidates can quickly be discounted in favour of somebody who happens to be available immediately. Sometimes that works brilliantly, but sometimes an employer ends up making a compromise that wouldn’t have been necessary if the recruitment process had started a few weeks earlier.

Contractors Can Solve a Genuine Problem

This is one of the reasons engineering contractors can be so useful. If you have a defined project, a sudden increase in workload or a short-term skills shortage, bringing in an experienced contractor can give the business some breathing space while also providing the skills you need immediately. It can remove the pressure to make a permanent appointment simply because somebody needs to be sitting at a desk or standing on the shop floor next Monday morning.

We work extensively with PAYE contractors across automotive, motorsport, aerospace, defence, marine and other specialist engineering sectors, and quite often the real requirement isn’t actually “we need another permanent employee”. It’s “we have a problem that needs solving for the next six months”. Those are two very different recruitment exercises and recognising the difference at the beginning can produce a much better result.

Talk to Your Recruiter Before You Have a Vacancy

It might sound slightly strange for a recruitment company to suggest talking to us when you don’t actually have a vacancy, but that’s often the best time to have the conversation. If we know that a client is likely to need additional design engineers, technicians, machinists or quality people over the next few months, we can keep an eye on the market and start thinking about where those people might come from.

We can also tell you what we’re seeing. Is the salary you’re considering realistic? Are the people you need readily available or particularly difficult to find? Would a contract solution make more sense initially? By the time the requirement becomes definite, we aren’t starting from zero and neither are you. That can make an enormous difference when the project finally gets the green light.

Final Thought

Some urgent recruitment will always be unavoidable. People resign, projects change and orders arrive unexpectedly, but where workforce requirements can be anticipated, even approximately, having the conversation early usually produces a better result. At ASL Technical, we’d much rather know what might be coming in three months than receive a desperate phone call at 4pm on Friday asking whether we can find three specialist engineers for Monday morning — although, inevitably, we get those calls too.

Urgency has a habit of turning recruitment into a search for whoever is available. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need, but when the skills are specialist and the appointment matters, a little forward planning gives you a much better chance of finding the right person rather than simply the fastest one.

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