How to Assess Electrical Engineering Skills for Hiring the Right Candidates?
Electrical engineers are meant to carry out extensive responsibilities. They take charge of multiple electrical projects, complex systems, machinery, and more. It is their duty to ensure all the electrical machines involved in a project are functional, legally compliant, and effective.
When in an industrial setup, you might be aware of how broad & complex the electrical engineering field can be. Hiring the right professionals for your projects will make a humongous difference in the efficiency, safety, and quality of work you deliver.
So, how are you planning on assessing electrical engineering skills in candidates to decide who’s the right pick for your company? Well, that’s where an electrical engineering skill test comes into play, marking an effective way to hire talented professionals for the role.
In this article, you will get a clear insight into how you can leverage the potential of an electrical engineering test for assessing a candidate’s technical capabilities, practical knowledge, and problem-solving skills.
Understanding the Importance of an Electrical Engineering Skill Assessment
When hiring electrical engineers, you can’t simply rely on their education, semester scores, and textual representation of skills. You ought to test them beyond their resume and determine the level of expertise they hold in carrying out real-world engineering projects.
It is true that prior graduation-level practical assignments do reveal a candidate’s fundamental knowledge of electrical engineering concepts. However, to ensure your projects are being handled by a proficient team, you must prefer multiple sets of evaluations beyond those assignments.
And that’s when you must introduce an electrical engineering skill test to your recruitment strategies. It is an efficient way of evaluating applicants on their core skills or traits related to the domain. From technical abilities to soft skills, every important attribute you seek in your team of electrical engineers will be tested through this assessment.
Here are some reasons why hiring electrical engineers with adequate skills is important:
1. Quality Work Output
Electrical engineering is a critical necessity in most industrial projects, and ensuring the seamless functionality of associated devices or systems is a must to guarantee work efficiency. Therefore, having the right assessment in place will help you evaluate the technical competencies and industry knowledge of electrical engineers, helping you determine if they are capable of producing high-quality work.
Example:
An electrical engineer with practical understanding and hands-on experience of circuits will be able to efficiently map the wiring of different electrical systems. Due to this, you won’t be at risk of experiencing malfunctions, and your overall operations will remain safe. In the end, your company’s reputation will also thrive, giving you better client satisfaction.
2. Faster Time-to-Completion
When hiring electrical engineers with optimal skills as expected, you will be able to optimize the overall workflow efficiency in your projects. Testing them on their comprehensive abilities in electricity and mathematics will help you guarantee that they can perform the duties effectively.
Thus, the overall job will speed up, reducing the overall time-to-completion! Beyond that, engineers with strong communication and active listening skills will also be helpful in decoding complex instructions and streamlining the work process without rookie mistakes.
3. Attaining Legal Compliance
Your electrical engineers, possessing the right skills, will be responsible for ensuring that all the devices or systems they work on are compliant with all legal regulations. Introducing an electrical engineering assessment to your recruiting process will help evaluate if a candidate is well-versed in industry standards or regulations.
Example:
When designing electrical systems, engineers are meant to take into account a lot of regulatory considerations, especially related to safety. Thus, they will be responsible for helping you avoid damaging lawsuits and expensive legal penalties.
What Skills for Electrical Engineers Can You Test through an Assessment?
Some of the crucial skills that an electrical engineering skill assessment will evaluate in candidates include:
1. Knowledge of Electrical Engineering Concepts
Being an electrical engineer by degree isn’t enough for candidates to prove their excellence in the domain. They must have a deep understanding of all the core concepts and principles of electricity and engineering applications around it.
The assessment must be tailored to test the candidates’ knowledge of electrical system designing, wiring, circuits, safety, and more. From using the right material to ensuring seamless functionality of electrical systems, a candidate must know everything.
2. Experience with Engineering Mathematics
Even in electrical engineering, the work executions rely immensely on data and numbers. Factors like resistance, area, current, voltage, and other such measurements involve the use of engineering mathematics, making it a critical skill for electrical professionals.
Testing this skill in candidates will ensure your electrical engineering projects are being executed effectively and accurately. Beyond basic mathematical understanding, this assessment will also test candidates on their advanced abilities, such as dealing with complex calculations while designing or testing various electrical systems.
A strong knowledge of calculus, algebra, and statistics will be determined through an electrical engineering skills assessment, ensuring your project won’t end up having multiple calculation errors or negligence issues.
3. Structural Engineering
In most instances, electrical engineers are required to work on construction projects, where they are responsible for carrying out electrical surveying, designing, and installation. In order to ensure efficient output and unhindered safety, it is important for the engineers to have a foundational understanding of structures, materials, and buildings.
If your company deals with construction projects and requires electrical engineers to be part of the team, testing the candidates on their structural engineering concepts is relevant.
4. Problem-Solving Ability
The role of an electrical engineer is a senior-level designation in any setup, and a company expects prompt problem-solving capabilities from him/her in various circumstances. In different work environments, the job of an electrical engineer is to detect & assess issues within the electrical systems, devices, or circuits, and recommend prompt solutions.
Therefore, this skills test will be important to evaluate problem-solving ability in your candidates. It will give you a perspective on whether your electrical engineers are capable of coming up with innovative ideas for sizable challenges.
5. Mechanical Reasoning
If your company deals with supplying industrial machinery and requires engineers to develop the electrical systems for them, testing candidates for their mechanical reasoning capabilities is crucial.
Based on the purpose of your hiring, you can evaluate your electrical engineering candidates for their knowledge of force, velocity, movement, gears, wheels, pulleys, and others. Understanding these mechanical principles is important in order to map an electrical system for powering the machine.
How to Implement an Electrical Engineering Skills Assessment in Your Recruitment Process?
Here are a few steps that you must follow in order to implement an electrical engineering skills assessment in your hiring process:
1. Set Your Hiring Expectations
Before choosing a test, you must define the specific skills for electrical engineers you seek, followed by the level of knowledge you are looking for in the candidates. Beyond that, you must also define the role, prior experience, and project details associated with your hiring needs.
2. Choose & Integrate the Right Test
There are different sets of electrical engineering skills tests for you to choose from, depending on what topics or domains you want to cover in the assessment. If you aren’t satisfied with the pre-defined tests, you can create & integrate a customized electrical engineering assessment, specific to your hiring goals.
3. Give Clear Instructions
Administering the tests becomes important when you are hiring for such an important role! Make sure you are providing clear & consistent instructions, scoring methods, and time limits for candidates to be prepared for the test. You also need to ensure that the test is being conducted on a safe platform, preventing technical issues or cheating.
4. Review the Results
Once the candidates complete their tests, you can then review the results based on transparent and objective criteria. The assessment tool itself will rank the candidates based on their scores, comparing their performance across different pre-defined expectations and benchmarks. Thus, it will be easier for you to filter the best electrical engineers for your organization.
How Can Ducknowl Help You with Assessing Electrical Engineering Skills for Hiring?
Ducknowl is one of the most sought-after skills assessment platforms, backed by ideal tools to make your hiring decisions smarter and more efficient. We provide an industry-specific electrical engineering skills assessment solution for you to integrate into your existing recruitment process.
Our electrical engineering test will help you evaluate candidates on all the core topics or domains specific to your hiring goals. Beyond our standard tests, we also provide you with the liberty of creating a custom electrical engineering skills test, tailored for your organizational requirements and expectations.
We have a centralized dashboard for you to review your candidates’ scores and their ranks, based on the predefined criteria. In addition to that, we offer a detailed breakdown of the scores to help you understand the areas where your potential electrical engineers are lagging or thriving. Thus, making your hiring decision will be even easier!
If you want to know more about our electrical engineering assessment, feel free to request a demo today!
Conclusion
Hiring talented electrical engineers for your industrial projects is essential in order to ensure client satisfaction, business productivity, and increased revenue generation. Therefore, you can’t just rely on the traditional hiring practices involving a resume overview and verbal questionnaire.
Today, it’s very important to test engineers to the best of their potential, and that’s possible through a well-curated electrical engineering assessment. Many times, there will be questions or evaluation parameters you might miss out on while implementing traditional hiring practices.
An electrical engineering test will help fill those gaps by covering almost all the fundamental and core concepts of varying topics or domains, leaving no stone unturned. So, if you want to hire the best-fit electrical engineers for your high-investment projects, integrating a comprehensive test will be a productive decision for you.
Reach out to us, and let Ducknowl help you quickly get started with smart hiring of electrical engineers for your organization.
