Why Your Engineering Role Isn’t Filling

When a client tells us a role has been open for five months, the explanation offered is almost always that there is nobody good available. In our experience that is the reason roughly one time in ten. Here is what it usually is instead.

The band is wrong

This is the most common cause and the least often accepted. A band set eighteen months ago is not a band today, and if you are advertising £42,000 for a role the market pays £50,000 for, the applications you receive will tell you exactly that. Look at who applied, not how many.

The work model is doing the rejecting

Five days on site for a design engineering role removes a substantial share of the available market before anyone has read the rest of the advert. For genuinely production-facing roles this is unavoidable and candidates understand it. For design, process and quality engineering it usually is not, and insisting on it is a choice with a cost attached.

The specification is two jobs

We see this constantly. A brief asks for deep design capability, hands-on commissioning, supplier management and continuous improvement leadership. Each is reasonable. Together they describe someone who does not exist, or who exists and is being paid half as much again as the band allows. Decide which two matter.

The process is too slow

A strong engineer in the current market holds two or three live processes. If your first stage is a fortnight after CV submission and your second is three weeks after that, you will lose them and you will never know why. The clients who hire well are not the ones paying most; they are the ones who decide fastest.

If a search has stalled, work through those four in order before concluding the market is empty. It usually is not.