VECTOR VISION

What to Look For When Hiring a Quality Technician

“It is quality rather than quantity that matters,” –Lucius Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

There is perhaps no situation where this sentiment is more relevant than when hiring a quality technician. Top technicians will always be more valuable and in higher demand than your average mid-skilled candidates. It’s especially relevant when referring to the employees who work hard to ensure your business meets or exceeds expectations. 

Whether you’re hiring to fill roles in the industrial, manufacturing, or engineering sectors, finding the best technicians requires patience and practiced hands. Here are a few top attributes that the most in-demand technicians tend to share.

Quality Technicians Have an Eye for Detail

Details are important. When you need to deliver the most technically specific, detail-oriented work, you’ll depend on your skilled technicians the most. They will need to be able to spot and identify problems with products, variations in production, or oversight in quality assurance, regardless of how subtle it might be.

Finding out if an applicant has an eye for detail you need can be challenging and could require a tailored interview process. Using custom skill tests, or asking detail-oriented interview questions could be an effective way to ascertain how much attention the candidate pays to detail.

They Should Possess High-Level Organizational Skill

The very nature of highly technical work demands an organized mind. It’s not hard to imagine how, in industries that can be as complex as manufacturing or engineering, highly organized technicians will perform better and deliver a higher caliber of work.

Because organizational skill can be an equally tricky soft skill to measure, employers will need several techniques to determine the organizational capacity of their candidate. But also, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll need intuition. Did the applicant come to their interview prepared? Were they on time? Even noting their appearance can indicate their organizational ability.

If your quality technician cannot effectively organize, clutter can build up around their workspace, increasing the chance for mistakes or other lapses that could impede the quality of their work..

A High Degree of Industry Knowledge

There are several ways to ensure your candidates are intimately familiar with your industry. Even casual conversation about their previous roles, and the tools with which they worked can reveal their industry knowledge.

These qualifiers will vary between industries, but for technological fields, the level of familiarity and knowledge can extend anywhere from a basic understanding of the tools of the trade to an advanced grasp of mathematics.

Fortunately, industry know-how is less nuanced and the applicant’s level of knowledge can be much simpler to gauge. While hiring managers can ascertain the candidate’s technical experience from their résumé, they should ask specific follow-up questions.

Specific questioning could be anything from discussing tools of the trade, processes, and industry standards. Their answers can create a more complete picture regarding not just their exposure to the industry, but their actual ability to apply their industry knowledge to create dynamic solutions or more efficient day-to-day processes.

Take the Headache Out of Hiring Quality Technicians

These days, finding technicians for the manufacturing, industrial, or engineering sector is harder than ever. Finding those technicians with a good balance between the real-world industry know-how, and more nuanced soft-skills can be even more difficult – definitely not something that you should have to tackle alone. Even candidates who look great on paper can, with an intuitive interviewer or the right line of questioning, turn out to be less than ideal. 

If you’re struggling to find a quality technician, or if it’s proving to be a more significant challenge than you would have liked, it might be worth enlisting some assistance. At Vector Technical, we offer recruitment services tailored to your industry to help you find the perfect fit for your team. 

So, if you need to find the quality technician of your dreams, or if you have any questions or concerns regarding the hiring process, please contact us today.

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