An Industrial Manufacturer's Guide to Recruiting Engineers

Branding a Recruiting Campaign

 

How should you communicate your brand to an audience of potential employees? Surely marketing your company as a great place to work is different than selling hardware integration services, right? It is.

Companies arrive at the point of recruiting for many reasons.  If you’re facing one of the following, it may be time to translate your corporate brand into a branded recruiting campaign:

 

Business Growth and Expansion

• Increased workload: As a company grows, it often requires more staff to handle the increased workload and maintain efficiency.
• New product or service launch: Introducing a new product or service might necessitate hiring additional personnel with specialized skills.
• Market expansion: Entering new markets may require hiring local talent with specific industry knowledge.

 

Talent Acquisition and Retention

• Skill gaps: The company might identify specific skill gaps within its workforce that need to be filled.
• Replacing departing employees: When employees leave the company, recruiting campaigns can help find suitable replacements.
• Attracting top talent: A well-executed recruiting campaign can help attract highly skilled professionals who are in demand.

 

Company Culture and Values

• Building a strong team: Recruiting the right people can contribute to a positive and productive company culture.
• Aligning talent with company values: Finding employees who share the company's mission, vision, and values can foster a more engaged and motivated workforce.

 

Innovation and Creativity

• Introducing new perspectives: Bringing in new talent with diverse backgrounds and experiences can stimulate innovation and creativity.
• Adapting to industry changes: Recruiting individuals with expertise in emerging technologies or trends can help the company stay competitive.

 

Competitive Advantage

• Differentiation: A strong talent acquisition strategy can set a company apart from competitors in the job market.
• Employer branding: A well-executed recruiting campaign can enhance the company's reputation as an attractive employer.

 

Regardless of the driver for the recruiting campaign, we’ll use the same process to develop a recruiting campaign as we would to develop a campaign around a new product or industry initiative:

1. Develop Target Personas
2. Interview Employees
3. Differentiate your Company
4. Build a Messaging Brief
5. Promote your Recruiting Campaign

Develop Target Personas

 

First, let’s define personas. Work with your department leadership and recruiters in the areas where you have the greatest need for talent. At a technical B2B company, one of these groups is likely engineers or technical professionals. Sales may be a target area, and even marketing or finance. Asking deeper questions of the hiring managers will help you further define these personas.

• What qualifications do candidates need? Is this a hiring situation where a culture fit is of utmost importance? Or does this candidate need specific skills, qualifications, or accomplishments? 
• What level of experience are you looking for? This will help you know what age range you’re targeting and where to share your message. If your hiring managers need 15+ years of experience, you’re reaching at millennials who statistically have families, and are looking for stable, long-term employment. You’ll find them on LinkedIn. If you’re hiring managers need new grads who can get started quickly, you’re looking for Gen Z engineers who are finishing their last semester in college. You’ll find them at university job fairs and through internship programs.
• What will a candidate experience during the hiring process? Are there skills tests? Onsite visits? Will they meet the team they’d potentially work with and get to experience the culture? 

You need this type of information not just to choose the right message, but to communicate an accurate tone, too. If the recruiting campaign messaging and tone is easy-breezy but the first interaction a candidate has with your company is a 90-minute aptitude test, the experience will feel disjointed for the candidate, and position the company poorly.

Take this information along with other careabouts like career goals, work style, and motivators into consideration when creating your target persona for a recruiting campaign. You will likely need a few different personas for recruiting in different departments.

Interview Employees

 

To ensure this recruiting campaign is authentic, dig deep to understand why employees want to work for your company, and why the excellent ones stay. Consider interviewing a mix of existing employees that include:

• Newer employees from the departments that are currently hiring
• Tenured employees from those departments who embody the corporate culture
• HR managers who know about corporate culture initiatives

Interview these employees to get their personal experiences with the company. These should be informal interviews that take place face-to-face and last about 15 minutes. You’re looking to uncover those specific details about your employee’s pain points before they began working with your company, how your company has given them a solution, what it’s like to work there, and any behind-the-scenes benefits that your employees experience.

Here’s a list of questions you can use when you interview those employees:

• How did you first find out about [our company]?
• What initially made you want to interview with [our company]?
• What was the interview process like?
• What do you think [our company] does better than others?
• Why have you kept working here?
• What’s your daily life here like (communication with peers/management)?
• Is there anything we do to help fulfill your professional goals?
• Is there anything we do to help fulfill your professional goals?
• Was there anything that positively surprised you in working here?

For example, here’s a sampling of responses from internal interviews focusing on experience at a company: 

• Keith, HR Director

• We’ve designed career programs for employees. After two years of employment, they’re able to apply for funding to take additional classes, and after four years, can receive funding for graduate degree programs. We work with a nearby state university so that courses and work hours come together in a cohesive schedule.
• Our C-level leadership sits at open desks with our engineering and operations teams. They’re accessible and available, leading by example. It’s not uncommon to see them working through a technical challenge or brainstorming possible revenue of a design win on a white board in a common space. They invite others to listen and offer their ideas.

• Jamie, Engineering Design Services Director 

• • I originally came in as an applications engineer and after a few years, had the opportunity to rotate into different departments. I found that I really enjoyed the design work we do for new clients. I moved to that team and now lead my own team there.

• • I enjoy our onsite customer visits. These let me see what I’m designing out in the real world and I also get to see the full scope of what we do – from initial design, through production, logistics management, integration, and support.

• Jen, Applications Engineer

• • The benefits I received as a new hire out of college, like a gym membership, social events on Fridays for new hires, and flexible options for insurance and vacation, really make me feel like they want me to be here and they’re investing in my career here.  

• In my first month, I was partnered with a sales person and able to go on sales visits and listen to sales calls. This gave me a great understanding of what challenges our clients have and how we as a company should go about solving them. I really got a feel for what it’s like to work here and the processes we use.

• Erin, Customer Support Manager

• Leadership has a weekly meeting with all of the staff. We’re able to ask questions about product roadmaps and technical challenges and we get insight into the business that I haven’t had before. 
• Because I get to interact with customers, I’m getting more experience in the industry. I get to truly hear what they’re facing and help come up with new solutions.  

• Jim, VP Client Services 

• • We have a mentoring program where younger engineers get paired with more experienced engineers in the same discipline. This provides a platform to ask questions and grow, as well as get to know leadership outside of their manager and director. 

• We run a company picnic each year and I’m on the planning committee. The goal of this event is to connect whole families at the organization over a weekend. We typically rent a large event space or a ranch and have activities for our employees and their partners, as well as kids. There’s food, music, contests, and games and the goal is that employees and their families have the opportunity to connect and have a memorable, no-hassle day.

Now, take some of these findings and analyze them. This is a great time to use an AI tool to add some quantitative analysis to your qualitative interviews.

To see how to prompt an AI tool to analyze the feedback from your employee interviews, download the guide.

You can also analyze the information on your own, making a list of things that your company does that really make a difference for employees. These benefits shouldn’t be hidden secrets – rather they’re tools you can use to promote your company to new potential employees.

Differentiate Your Company

 

Take the interview excerpts from above and start to group them into differentiators and proof points that support your company when recruiting. Looking at the quotes from Keith, Jamie, Jen, Erin, and Jim, above, you could start to group their details into differentiators like this:

 

Recruiting Differentiator: Long-term employee investment

Proof Points (based on employee interviews):

• Lifestyle benefits that make people want to stay
  • Gym memberships
  • Company-organized socials
  • Flexible healthcare – HSA, PPO, etc
• Career investment
  • Grants for continuing education classes
  • Scholarships for full masters degrees
  • Work/school programs for those getting graduate degrees
  • Group rotation for career exploration

 

Recruiting Differentiator: Access to True Expert Engineering Leadership

Proof Points (based on employee interviews):

• Weekly all-company meetings
• “Ask me Anything” sessions with execs
• Engineering mentor program
• Open floorplans and discussions
• Internal technical development programs

 

Recruiting Differentiator: Customer Engagement

Proof Points (based on employee interviews):

• Direct engagement with customers
• Participation in industry groups and associations
• Experience with sales and support calls
• Onsite customer visits
• Experience end-to-end engineering – initial design, through production, logistics management, integration, and support
• Proven process training 

 

Revisit your corporate tone and messaging. Make sure your corporate tone comes through in your recruiting messages. If your corporate tone was identified as confident, reassuring, and conversational, this tone should be taken into consideration when you’re recruiting. Depending on what types of roles you’re recruiting for and the target audience you’ve defined, your tone may vary somewhat from your corporate tone. 

If you’re an engineering integration firm and your corporate target audience is technical and authoritative, but you’re hiring new graduates for your marketing team, you can lighten the tone to match that of your marketing department – who is likely not in a mission-critical mindset 24/7. The tone of recruiting should match what candidates experience when they interview. 

 

Recruiting Differentiator: Long-term employee investment

• Headline: Here to Help you Engineer your Future
• Descriptor: From gym memberships and social meetups for your personal life, to support for continued education and career exploration, we’ll come alongside you to help you achieve the personal and professional future you’ve imagined.

Recruiting Differentiator: Access to True Expert Engineering Leadership

• Headline: Learn from the Leaders on a Level Playing Field
• Descriptor: We’d say our managers and leadership doors are open, but they’re actually nonexistent. Our teams sit in open, level workplaces that foster cross-department discussions, provide access to leadership, and support the career mentoring available for each employee.

Recruiting Differentiator: Customer Engagement

• Headline: Hands-on, End-to-End Experience
• Descriptor: “I sit at desk all day, everyday,” says absolutely no one who works here. Our employees are visiting customers, overseeing production, troubleshooting support, and taking part in industry events that give them the real-world experience needed to fulfill their daily lives and long-term careers. 

Build a Messaging Brief

 

Let’s take these differentiator headlines and create an overall message, too. Also remember your corporate differentiators. If, for example, they were overall reliability, customization capabilities, and end-to-end engineering support, you may want to include those messages into your overall recruiting campaign pitch.

To see what the final messaging brief looks like put together, download the guide.

Promote Your Recruiting Campaign 

 

With your messaging set, it’s time to execute the corporate brand by taking it out into the public. Recruiting campaigns leverage some different channels than product campaigns. Pitching your company as a great place to work to a trade publication won’t likely garner any results, but a well-placed LinkedIn ad, updates to job descriptions, and new career page messaging can go a long way. Just like any time you’re promoting your brand. Think of your target audience. Where are they? If you’re looking for Design and mechanical engineers with 0-3 years of experience, they’re likely looking for leads on LinkedIn and checking out a video about what life at your company is like.

Create deliverables that can be used across the company to help promote your recruiting campaign. Remember, like any campaign, to portray a consistent brand, continue using the campaign headline message and differentiators you’ve crafted. You’ll tire of them long before your prospects do, but switching messages will not create the consistent, strong brand you’re looking to present.

Here are 10 key deliverables to build out your recruiting campaign and get your brand in front of prospective employees. 

1. Slide deck: Create a set of slides about your company and culture that can be used to update existing employees on your commitment to corporate culture, inform HR of the differentiators you’ve identified and messaged. Populate slides with the support details for each differentiator. Later, you can use these same slides to  introduce new hires to your corporate culture during their initial training.

2. Graphics: Explore your options to graphically represent your company to prospective candidates. Partnerships and corporate values are great opportunities for these. Be sure to use your corporate colors and fonts so these new graphics support your overall corporate brand. See the example of Silex’s “Difference Makers” graphic on the following pages.

3. Videos: Similar to graphics, use short (less than 90 seconds) videos to communicate your key recruiting messages. These should feature actual employees and leadership communicating their experience in working for your company. If you have a corporate video that features what you do for clients, this can also be included in recruiting campaigns to help easily communicate what you do as a company.

4. Personal Profiles/Articles: It’s one thing for a company to say what they do for employees, employees sharing firsthand accounts go along way to support the brand. Have employees of varied tenures tell their stories of working for the company. Have each employee focus on how they’ve lived one of the differentiators. Using our example Recruiting Brief above, you could have an employee share a story about the personal perks they’ve been able to take advantage of since they started working at your company. You could also have someone describe their experience going on customer visits, or publish an interview of an employee and their career mentor about what the mentoring program has been like. See the example of ACE’s articles on the following pages.

5. Updates to careers pages: Use the headlines and differentiators to update your Careers page with messaging that reflects your brand. See the Hallam-ICS example on the following pages.

6. Updates to job descriptions: Use the campaign pitch that you created to update the company overview in each of your open job descriptions.

7. Corporate Collateral: Update any collateral used in recruiting. This might include handouts given at college or recruiting fairs, or even digital collateral like an email nurture series following a recruiting fair.

8. PR: While the industry trade publications that you target with product branding or corporate campaigns aren’t the right target for a recruiting message, you can explore local or business outlets who may be interested in your growth and hiring efforts. See the Knowles example of a polished corporate article in the following pages.

9. Awards: Applying for local awards for “Best Places to Work” can also easily tie into your  recruiting campaign. The recruiting branding brief and employee interviews you’ve already completed, along with some HR and Finance data, will give you most of the information you need to complete an award application.

10. LinkedIn/Social Promo: Use the graphics, videos, and messaging to generate posts to promote your company’s open positions. Review your employee interviews and ask those employees if you can use their quotes publicly online in promotion. If you have a big recruiting push to target specific types of engineers or people in a certain geographic region, consider using paid LinkedIn ads. Depending on your demographic, you may want to venture into paid social advertising on platforms like Instagram as well.

Conclusion

 

Branding a recruiting campaign for engineering companies is essential for attracting and retaining top talent.

It’s not just about filling positions; it’s about building a team that aligns with your company’s values. Remember, the key to a successful recruiting campaign lies in consistency and authenticity. Showcase what makes your organization a great place to work.

With the right approach, you can create a compelling brand that resonates with future employees and drives your company’s success.

Real-World Execution

 

To see real-world examples of recruiting campaigns in action, download the guide.