How to Find Technical Candidates When Local Hiring Isn't Working

When you need a specialist technical role filled, and it's been open for months, you need to take drastic action to get people in vacancies and have people on your team to support what you do. But what do you do when those people are scarce, when there's a significant shortage of suitable or experienced candidates applying for your vacancy? There are options, but you need to know where to look to help you reach the right people.

Let's take a look.

Post on Niche Job Boards

You don't want to attract anyone to your job role; you need the right people, and this means advertising where they're more likely to be looking and in a place that has already filtered out the majority of unsuitable applicants. Niche job boards narrow the field considerably. Looking at sites such as Engineering Job or Techno jobs, as well as Dice, CWjobs and Stack Overflow jobs, will give you a much better response than general jobs boards that have people looking for a vast range of sectors.

Make sure you know exactly where to advertise and which boards match your vacancy for improved results here.

Use Boolean Search on LinkedIn

You can take matters into your own hands here and use LinkedIn Boolean searches to help you build precise queries to find talent looking for new roles or even passive candidates who aren't looking but could be persuaded with the right hook.

Operators like “AND, OR and NOT” will affect results significantly. So searching "instrumentation engineer” AND “pharmaceutical” AND “GMP” pulls a significantly different list than a keyword search alone, as you're filtering out people who don't have all of these things listed in their files.

From here, you can connect with the right applicants directly about the roles over a generic outreach approach.

Work with An International Recruitment Agency

Here's the thing: you can't always find who you need domestically. There's a significant skill shortage in the UK, and you might need to expand your search further afield.

This means working with a specialist international recruitment agency that has access to talent pipelines in geographies where technical training is strong.

The pre-qualification this brings is significant. Candidates are assessed against the technical spec before they reach you; this removes the screen workload and produces a shooter list of genuinely qualified people.

Use Professional Associations and Membership Bodies

This is an excellent way to find the perfectly qualified candidates for your existing roles. You're going to the places that know the qualified individuals, as they need to hold the relevant experiences and meet the criteria to be a member of the association.

There are places such as The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply and equivalent bodies in your sector. You can post a relevant role and expect to reach an audience that has already self-selected by qualification level.

Run a Referral Scheme

This won't work for everyone, but by offering a structured referral scheme for your existing employees to attract new hires for you can be a valid route for some businesses. Successful candidates who are pre-vetted by someone who knows them and what you do can be invaluable. Regular hires also tend to have better retention than cold applicants too.