Common Mistakes When Hiring a Structural Engineering Consultant
The professionals that you hire to work for your organisation will have a great effect on your ultimate success in the market. The toll is even greater if you are hiring professionals to run your building project. This is the reason why you should take your time and ensure that you land the best structural engineering consultant to run your project through to completion.
Rushing the recruitment process:
Many companies will wait until the last minute to begin the hiring process. They therefore end up hiring an incompetent structural engineering consultant. There is need to identify the leading structural engineers in your area before the project initiation phase and come up with a shortlist of around five candidates. This will allow you enough time to plan for personal interviews in order to identify the best candidate in terms of their knowledge and experience. It will then be easy to interview each of them. Interviewing candidates in a hurry means that you may forget to ask some important questions or fail to understand what the interviewer is saying.
Lack of interviewing skills:
Interviewing the shortlisted candidates will be very vital in identifying right structural engineering consultant. This means that you should follow the right interviewing procedure. All the members in the interviewing panel should be trained and should have vast experienced in conducting recruitment interviews. They should also be aware of the specific needs of the company so that they can be specific in their questions.
Failure to conduct a good background check:
Any structural engineering consultant is aware of what the market needs. They may therefore lie about their ability and experience in an attempt to impress you into hiring them. Carrying out a background check on the contractor will however provide a better picture about their ability by reviewing their portfolio and what other customers think of them. A successful structural engineer will always have happy customers who have used his services. His previous projects will also help you to compare him with the other options that you have. Trusting what the consultant says about his company is never enough as he may throw in a few lies in his statements.
Although using third party hiring agencies to hire a structural engineering consultant cannot be dismissed as a mistake, there is need to review the selected candidate’s profile on your own. The hiring agency may not understand the specific needs of your project. This is the main reason as to why many companies prefer to interview the consultants on their own.
Although mistakes are part of the hiring job, the ones listed here can be avoided. Unfortunately, many professional hiring managers still error when choosing the right consultant for their company’s structural engineering needs. However, being weary of them will ensure that you hire the right practitioner for your project.