Have you heard the story of how Thomas Edison screened potential new research assistants? Legend has it that he would invite applicants out for a meal and order soup for the table. As the story goes, he did this to see how the applicants approached the situation. Did they make assumptions about the blandness and season the soup before tasting it, or did they allow themselves to taste it first and decide afterward if seasoning was necessary? Edison’s purpose was to weed out those who seasoned before tasting, reasoning that those who relied on assumptions would not produce the kind of open-minded Scientists and Engineers he needed in his laboratory. The lesson from this tale is to think about how best to evaluate a candidate for a potential position on your team.
Design schedules are becoming increasingly accelerated, and competition is compressing fees. These two forces are putting tremendous pressure on design staff, and it is more important than ever to ensure the young engineers you are hiring are productive team members. As the leader, it is your job to select candidates with the skills (both hard and soft) to be effective engineers who can learn from experience as they advance in their careers. The author has used the following practices successfully and are recommended as a best practices approach
Determining if a new graduate candidate has the required minimum hard skills needed for an entry-level position is not something that can be gleaned from reviewing a resume or asking general questions in a standard interview format. Instead, it requires digging a bit deeper. The first recommendation is to review a copy of the candidate’s transcripts before the interview, evaluating what classes a student chose to take and how well they performed. A degree and graduation year on a resume does not offer much information besides that they graduated. However, seeing the student’s transcript gives you more insight. Did they take a relevant number of structural engineering classes? Was there a good mix of analysis and design? How well did they do – average or above average? In addition, you should see relevant classes that reinforce the necessary soft skills desired in practice, such as technical writing and a drafting class.This recommendation helps frame the candidates’ backgrounds beyond the cursory information in their resumes. As a future Professional Engineer, the class selection and performance lend insight into their skills and the seriousness of their passion for their chosen profession. This should be the first step in evaluating a candidate before the interview.
Once you have decided that the candidate may be a good fit, it is time to bring them in for an interview. During the interview, this is your opportunity to observe and assess their soft skills. How do they carry themselves in a professional environment? What is their communication ability (speaking and writing)? How do they interact with others? As the saying goes, half of a Structural Engineer’s job involves design, and the other half is communicating our design. One useful assessment exercise is to bring the candidate around to see the office and meet other employees. Observe how they interact with their potential teammates or leaders. Are they communicative? Do they seem interested and genuinely thoughtful in asking questions about the office environment, current projects, etc.? Not only do you see how the candidate interacts, but it also allows others within your firm to interact with the candidate. While this interaction may be brief, your current employees may form important opinions about the candidate’s ability to fit within the current team. While this should not be the only consideration, your employees’ opinions are an important metric to consider.
By this point in the process, you should start to form an opinion on whether a candidate is a good fit. If this is the case, it is recommended that one final technical assessment is performed – the interview quiz. This has shown to be, by far, the best way to assess the knowledge of a potential graduate. In addition, the quiz removes any potential implicit bias you or those in your firm involved in the hiring process may have towards a candidate. Finally, it provides an objective assessment of skills, which best indicates a candidate’s potential ability. Therefore, the quiz should be developed to probe areas of knowledge deemed relevant to the position and confirm a candidate’s grasp of fundamental structural mechanics. Questions should be tailored to your specific needs, but, generally, for an entry-level position, the following are recommended:
1) Statics and structural analysis (i.e., determine reactions and draw the shear and moment
diagrams for a specific beam loading);
2) Load path fundamentals/understanding;
3) Steel design (i.e., sketch a simple shear connection);
4) Concrete design (i.e., indicate where the tension reinforcement would be placed in this frame system).
The quiz should be kept to a reasonable length (less than 45 minutes to complete) and not require a calculator. Besides the answers, hopefully correct ones, the quiz also provides insight into how the candidate thinks and their writing and sketching ability (the importance of soft skills and communication). Additionally, the quiz reveals how they deal with pressure – presumably, this was not something they expected or prepared for when they came in for the interview.
In summary, these recommendations are best practices for evaluating candidates for entry-level structural engineering positions to introduce quantitative metrics into the hiring process. The goal is to minimize potential biases and successfully hire a candidate with the skills necessary to be a productive team member. These approaches may be new, but it is certainly worth considering adding them to your interview process. Of course, once you have found the right candidate and they have accepted your employment offer, be sure to take them out to lunch for soup to celebrate!■