​The Best Way to Employ an Engineer

And the common mistakes you are probably making..

Here is a fact for you. Many engineers do not know how to choose the best applicant for an engineering role. Here’s another fact for you. Those same engineers happen to think that they are pretty good at choosing the best applicant for an engineering role.

In this post, I will cover what is known about the best way to choose an applicant. Then I will combine this with what is known about engineering expertise. So you select the best engineering candidate next time. Then, I will go over some common mistakes – so you also know what not to do.
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Not employing an engineer any time soon; more likely to be applying for an engineering role than advertising one? Not to worry; this post will also help explain the root cause of your frustration with employers not understanding all you can offer them.​

The best way to select employees

The first thing to understand is that intuition is not that great.

Most of the time.

Intuition is great when you need to repeat a task often and get near instant feedback. If you are a data scientist or data engineer, or even if you just know the basics, then think about neural-network training. That’s how our brains work too. We need a large amount of data.

​Also, for our intuition to work well, we need our whole brain working on the task, we want the emotional side, the creative side, and the analytical side all focused on the task. Only then, when your whole brain is trained on a large amount of data, can you rely on your intuition.

And this simply does not happen when employing an engineer.

First, it is not the case that any company needs to be employing one engineer after the other. There have been a few times in history when this has happened, but that’s simply not the norm.

Second, it is not possible to get the instant feedback needed. By the time the suitability of an engineer is evident to you, you probably can’t even recall what you noticed about them in the interview process. So you can’t update and refine your intuition.

Now that you can see why intuition is not suited to employing an engineer, let’s talk about the best way to select an employee.
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This is explained convincingly by Daniel Kahneman in his now-well-known book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (https://amzn.to/4bft5Qp). The steps to selecting the best employee are:

1. Think about the specific role you wish to fill.
2. Think of the traits needed to perform this role – no more than 6, independent of each other and measurable.
3. List the questions you will ask for each trait to determine their presence. These questions should be factual.
4. Make sure you have an idea of what makes for a weak answer and what makes for a strong answer for each question.
5. Find a way to answer each question.*
6. Collect the answers in order – do not skip around - for each applicant.
7. Add up the scores for the questions for each applicant.
8. Resolve to select the applicant with the highest score – no matter who you like the most.

*This is not mentioned by Kahneman, but it is common to use aptitude tests in engineering applications.  I have spoken with managers who have witnessed success when comparing the results of these tests with the performance of employees.​

Selecting the best engineering applicant

I mentioned the attributes of expert engineers in my book (https://amzn.to/4beNiWH). The three main ones are:

1. Framing – the ability to turn a given problem into a different, but solvable, one that will give the desired outcome.
2. First-principles – the ability and tendency to use theory to inform and accelerate engineering decisions.
3. Systemic thinking – the ability to consider the broader context for both opportunities and risks while developing an engineering solution.

These could make up three separate traits or they could be one trait (engineering expertise). Regardless, you will need to develop a way to assess these.

You could do this by presenting a case and then asking the applicant how they would respond for each attribute.
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For example: Consider the following problem [describe a challenge your company faces or once faced]:

1. What are other ways we could view this challenge to make it easier to solve?
2. What theories are applicable to this challenge and what insights can you gain from their application?
3. List how the various subsystems interact with each other, what surrounding systems might need to be considered, and how all this could be used to overcome the challenge.

Give thought to how long you would want to give applicants to answer these questions.
You can then also give thought to other traits you need for the specific role you are looking to fill. When you do this, you need to ensure you assess things genuinely worth assessing. So let’s now talk about mistakes made when selecting engineering employees.

Mistakes made when selecting engineering employees

The most common mistake I've seen made is the demand for software skills. Things like: SolidWorks, Revit, Altium, Confluence, and even Microsoft Office.

Consider this question: how long would it take to learn to use any of these software programs?

Most courses take hours, days or weeks. This is minor compared to the time it takes to build engineering expertise – which is typically agreed to be around 10 years. Do not make the mistake of dismissing an expert engineer as an applicant because you don’t think to simply train them in the software you use.

There is also the mistake about experience.

In my book, you can read about an engineer who had worked in an ice-cream factory not being employed by a rail engineering company. The reason for this was that the manager at the rail company felt the experience was not applicable. However, once the realities of keeping a food production factory working, especially one that deals with frozen food, became apparent, the employer changed their perspective. We all think the work done by others is easier than it is. We also have a tendency to dismiss the skills of others. As I also mentioned in my book – if a telephone counsellor can make a good pastry chef, then most engineering skills are probably sufficiently transferable. Think about the key pieces of knowledge that are unique to the role you’re trying to fill. Now think about how long it would really take to provide sufficient training. Once again, don’t dismiss an expert engineer just because you don’t think to train them.

Third, and you will now see that there is a trend, is the mistake of knowledge and practice.

I have witnessed the following scenario in an interview for a data science role.  The employer asked what to do if data were not available because the colleague who had received the data from the client was ill. The response was meant to be – contact the client for the data to be resent. This question was meant to determine how the applicant could keep working in the face of a challenge the company had faced before. However, the solution could be explained to anyone in less than 30 seconds. It would have been much wiser to ask a question related to the core knowledge and abilities needed for data science – the type that take 10 years to develop.
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The final mistake I want to cover breaks from the trend evident above. Choosing the person you like.

​We often like people who are similar to us. And we probably want someone like us to do the job we are trying to fill. So it makes sense to employ people we like. But this does two things:

1. It reduces diversity of thought in the team. If everyone is like you, then  everyone will make the same mistakes you make. But you want someone who can correct your mistakes before they become large enough to become problems.
2. It reduces the chance of employing someone who lacks enough social skills to point out the issues no-one else wants to mention - even when everyone can see them. There is value in being brutally honest at times - and it is often people we do not like who have this "skill".

Summary

The key to employing the best engineer is to make the process objective and focus on the traits we genuinely need in an employee. This is because we do not employ people often enough nor do we get feedback fast enough to develop a good intuition for the process. Also, an objective process encourages diversity in the team.