Hiring engineers when everyone is hiring engineers

You are not going to out-bid a national on salary, pension and a new van, so stop trying to. The opening for a small water hygiene firm is everywhere a big employer is rigid, and the way to fill a vacancy is to compete there instead of in the lane everyone else is stuck in. That, plus a willingness to grow your own rather than wait for the finished article to answer an advert.

The shortage is bad enough that you have to find an opening somewhere. On the IET's 2025 skills survey, 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers puts UK demand at 124,000 new engineers and technicians a year against an annual shortfall of 37,000 to 59,000. Underneath that sits a slower problem.

The shortage is structural, not a bad quarter

The workforce is ageing out. The strategy firm Stonehaven expects a fifth of the existing engineering workforce to retire over the next five years, and a shortfall of a million engineers by 2030. Read that alongside the recruitment numbers and the strategy writes itself. You are competing for a shrinking pool against everyone else, and the people you most want, the experienced and ticketed ones, are the ones closest to leaving the trade altogether.

Which is why chasing the finished engineer on the open market is the most crowded lane there is. Every firm within an hour's drive has the same advert out for the same person, and the nationals have deeper pockets to win the bidding. You can play that game and occasionally win it, at a price that erodes what you were hiring to protect.

Compete where the big firms can't

Be honest about where you lose. A national or a large regional will out-pay you, out-pension you and hand over a newer van, and they can draw a career ladder on a whiteboard that you cannot match. That is how they draw candidates in, so do not fight them on their ground.

Compete somewhere else. In a firm of two to fifty, the engineer talks to the person whose name is on the company, not a regional manager three layers up. The work is varied, because you cannot afford to put one person on the same asset type all year even if you wanted to. The rota can bend around a college day or a school run without a change request climbing a hierarchy. And your tools can be genuinely good, because you can replace your whole software stack in a fortnight where a national needs a committee and a budget round. None of those cost you a salary uplift, and all of them are things a big employer's structure actively prevents.

Grow your own, and count it as compliance

The alternative to hiring a finished engineer is making one. A trainee or apprentice, paired with a real competence framework, will beat a year spent waiting for the perfect CV to land. Start the competence matrix on their first day rather than the week before an audit, and record what they can do as they learn to do it. The training you build that way pays off twice. It keeps people who would otherwise drift to a bigger name, and it is evidence you are legally supposed to hold anyway.

Competence records are compliance records. The Legionella Control Association's 2024 audit update says that while it is common to see good records for technicians, the association is seeing significant gaps for the other roles in legionella control: surveyors, designers and planners. Being able to evidence competence in those roles, it says, is a requirement of LCA membership. If you are growing people into them, the training matrix that proves they are competent is the same document an LCA auditor will ask to see.

Tendring District Council pleaded guilty to a single charge relating to its legionella management systems and was fined £27,000 with costs at Colchester Magistrates' Court in December 2018, after a regular customer at its Walton-on-the-Naze Lifestyles leisure centre contracted Legionnaires' disease and, the court heard, spent 18 days in hospital. Its chief executive said the council "was not ignorant of Legionella, but our systems for managing the risk fell short of the standard they should have been". Knowing the rules is one thing. Being able to show your system met them is the part an auditor can check, and competence is one of the things it is made of. Training records are the cheapest insurance in the business, and the only version that counts is the one you can produce on demand.

Be honest about pay

None of this means pay does not matter. It does, and pretending otherwise is how you lose the people you trained. Get within reach of the market rate. You do not have to win on salary, but you cannot be the obvious low bid, and once you are close enough, let everything a big firm can't offer do the rest. The soft stuff is your margin over a larger competitor, not a substitute for a fair wage. Sell a trainee a career and pay them badly, and they will take the career, and the reference, to whoever pays properly.

Keeping them is the same problem

Recruitment gets the attention, but the cheapest engineer to hire is the one who does not leave. Exit conversations in this trade keep returning to the same handful of complaints. People feel like a number in a company small enough that they never should. The evenings lost to paperwork the office could have designed better start to grate. And the tool that is meant to help them fights them on every job instead. Little of that is about money, and most of it is inside your control.

The paperwork and the fighting-kit complaints are really one complaint, and we pulled it apart in why engineers abandon field apps. The double-entry tax, every reading written once by hand on site and typed again at a desk that night, is its own quiet morale drain and its own line-item cost. An engineer who has re-keyed the same forty readings twice has learned something about your firm that a pay rise will not unteach.

Where this leaves the software

Two of the problems above are software problems, and they are ones we took personally when we built the BlueWave engineer app: forms that fill in the plant room and sync themselves later, so nobody re-keys a visit at nine in the evening and there is no paper round-trip to resent. The competence side gets a quieter benefit. Because every visit records who did the work, the same system that runs your jobs is building the who-is-competent-at-what picture your next audit will ask for, without anyone maintaining it by hand.

You cannot out-spend the shortage. What you can be is the firm a good engineer does not want to leave, which over five years is cheaper and rarer than any signing bonus. Start with the two things that cost nothing: talk to your people like people, and stop making them do the same job twice.