Hey, it’s Collin. Welcome to Engineering Echelons, a newsletter full of ideas and insights to help engineers excel at management.

Here’s what I’ve got for you this week.

• New and noteworthy news

• Improving the recruiting funnel

• Management insights

• And more…

First time reading? You can subscribe here.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Noteworthy Headlines

MEP engineers earned more than ever in 2023 (Consulting-Specifying Engineer)

Highlights:

• Average base salary rose 3.4% to $118,310; over 50% of respondents received a salary of more than $100,000.

• 77% received an average of $24,081 in nonsalary compensation.

The 3 factors driving up global construction costs increase of 2-7% in 2025 (Construction Briefing)

Overview:

• Economic uncertainty

• The digital technology revolution and the growth of AI

• A chronic lack of skilled construction workers

Construction Material Prices Rose in January (ENR)

Highlights:

• Materials prices increased at the fastest monthly pace in two years in January

• Price increases due to energy prices rising sharply, start-of-year price hikes, and a rush to buy material inputs before tariffs go into effect

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Management Perspective

The recruiting funnel is a common visual for describing the process of identifying and filtering down candidates until a position is filled. It works, but it’s limited and can feel transactional.

Instead, the funnel can be extended to include effectiveness and growth after hiring is complete. Think about hiring more holistically. To do so, include employment after making the hire. This transforms the transactional nature of the recruiting funnel into a relationship that fosters a strong culture.

Here’s the extended funnel Will Larson shares in his book An Elegant Puzzle.

Identify

Self-explanatory: You first have to identify potential candidates. There are three main ways to identify candidates.

• Inbound - candidates who apply directly

• Sourced - candidates whom you proactively find and engage

• Referred - candidates whom your network already knows

Motivate

After you’ve identified potential candidates, you need to motivate them to apply and interview.

Some companies skip this part of the funnel because they have the mindset that if a candidate isn’t motivated to apply, then they aren’t a fit. Maybe the candidate doesn’t have passion for the role.

While this might be true, top candidates usually have options. Your job in recruiting top talent is to position your company and the open role as a main contender in the mind of the candidate(s).

Evaluate

Once you have motivated candidates, the next step is to determine if they would be beneficial additions to the team. This is difficult, as it requires some speculation.

One thing to note: do not structure the evaluation period in a way that diminishes the candidate motivation discussed in the previous step. Moving too slowly, requiring too many hoops to jump through, etc. all have deleterious effects.

Close

Closing is similar to motivation, but the commitment is obviously larger. Motivation is a day (or few days) commitment to apply and interview. Closing is the candidate committing many years to work with you and your team to achieve a vision.

Compensation, benefits, flexibility, autonomy, responsibility, culture, and many more factors go into closing the candidate. It’s important to remember that everyone is different and as such, each factor may carry different degrees of importance to them.

Here is where we extend the funnel…

Onboard

Once you’ve closed the candidate, you have to onboard them and get them up to speed. We shared one way to quantify this in a previous edition. Basically, the more robust and efficient an onboarding program is, the quicker new hires get up to speed and contribute meaningfully.

Impact

Here we consider how impactful staff are after hiring them. The important thing to look at here is trends. Are staff growing? Have their responsibilities changed? If so, how did they adjust? Are there certain responsibilities that better align with that person’s strengths?

Impact is important for both the company and the individual. The company obviously needs employees who make productive impact. On the other side of the coin, employees who feel like what they are doing is important and has a direct impact on the success of the company and the world, are usually more motivated to keep doing great work.

Promote

Employees need options for career paths within the company. Otherwise, they might look for paths that are outside the company.

Managers often have more insight into opportunities across the organization. So sometimes it is helpful for the manager to instill ideas of potential career paths for their teammates. Doing so not only shares opportunities, it also shows the employee that you care about them and their professional potential.

How long does it take staff to get promoted? And then how long does it take to get promoted again? These durations are useful for determining whether employees have access to opportunities within the organization.

Retain

Are the people you hire staying? If they aren’t, this indicates a potential issue with one of the other steps of the funnel.

The problem with this metric is that it’s a lagging factor: the people have already left after you count them. And they probably had been considering leaving for many months (or even years) before they actually did.

Management Insights

Tony Hsieh on the role of a manager:

“The role of a manager is to remove obstacles and enable his/her direct reports to succeed. This means the best leaders are servant-leaders. They serve those they lead.”

—

Winston Churchill on being qualified and prepared:

“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

—

Peter Bernstein on risk management:

“The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.”

Management Resource

Improve Workflows by Managing Bottlenecks (MIT Sloan Management Review)

Bottlenecks are a major speedbump for delivering engineering work. Changing the way staffing and project management are structured can help.

This article provides visuals and examples to show how bottlenecks manifest in different situations and how they can be reduced.

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Send me an email at [email protected]

Looking forward to hearing from you. See you next time.

Collin

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