5 strategies to build a robust talent pipeline in the construction engineering fields

Future proof your construction engineering recruitment requirements by building effective talent pipelines now! Read this post for 5 strategies to help your get the right talent for future jobs.

Many recruitment challenges in the construction engineering fields can be alleviated if companies adopted talent pipeline strategies. In the current market place this has become more and more important as experienced candidates are few and far between. Instead of being reactive when your company needs to fill a vacancy or expand its team, a proactive approach is a much better way of ensuring you get the right candidates when you need them.

Here are a few ideas of how you can do it.

Building a talent pipeline – 5 construction engineering recruitment strategies

1. A strong employer brand attracts candidates to you

It’s much better to have candidates queuing up to work for you than to have to go out looking for them. Your employer brand is what attracts them to your company so make sure you’re communicating it clearly at every opportunity.

Don’t just promote your employer brand when you’re on a recruitment drive, instead make sure the message is getting through on a regular basis. This is particularly important for engaging passive candidates. They’ll be more willing to engage with you if they already have an awareness of your brand and what working for your company will be like.

For more on making your employer brand work effectively, read this!

2. Target candidates with the right cultural fit

You’ll get a much better return on investment from all your recruitment strategies if your messaging is highly targeted. That might seem like a challenge when you recruit for a range of different roles, which is why general messaging should be aimed at attracting candidates with the right cultural fit.

To do this identify the key things that differentiate employees who work for your company, their shared values and qualities that are aligned with your company culture. Use these key messages consistently across all your communications to ensure that candidates with the right cultural fit are attracted to the brand.

3. Understand what your company’s future needs are

Talent pipelines are about future proofing you recruitment requirements and ensuring that when a role becomes available you have the right candidates ready to take it. Therefore, you need to have a good idea of what your future recruitment needs will be.

Once you know what skills and experience your company are likely to need in the future, whether that’s in 6 months or in 5 years, speak to a specialist recruitment agency so they can align their strategies with yours. Our approach is to work with candidates and clients long term; we’ll identify and nurture candidates that could be a great fit for your company in the future.

4. Look for talent within your company

Recruitment is not just about hiring new employees it’s also about promoting from within and retaining existing staff. One of the challenges many employers face is that although they may have people ready to step up into a new role, they haven’t got the people to replace them.

Your talent pipeline should factor this in by targeting the candidates who can fill those shoes as well as candidates that can fill more senior roles. My own experience at Energi (as an employer as well as a recruiter) is that having good career progression really shores up our talent pipelines. We recruit trainees and junior recruiters who are attracted to Energi because we have a well-structured career pathway, and as they get their promotions we have new candidates ready to join the team.

5. Nurture your talent pools

Ideally a talent pipeline moves candidates from the ‘attract’ stage – where candidates are attracted to your employer brand – to the recruitment stage where they’re offered (and accept) a job. But this process may take a long time, years in some cases. So it’s important that once you have good candidates in the pipeline you also nurture them in ‘talent pools’ to keep them engaged long term.

It should be a two-way street, where you keep them informed about your company and they keep you informed about their career and the direction they’re going. So don’t just push information at them, also ask for updates from them too.

I hope you found this useful. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss your long term recruitment plans or for more on developing effective talent pipelines. We’re nurturing lots of candidates that might be perfect for your company so if you want to tap into our talent pools, give me a call!