Breaking Hiring Habits

Helen Ramsay on how STEM Returners helped her build a high- performing, diverse engineering team

RECRUITING is hard – because getting it wrong has consequences. A poor hire can strain team dynamics and performance, and addressing underperformance is rarely simple. That’s why many managers lean toward “safe” choices: hiring engineers who resemble those already on the team, or even themselves. But as chemical engineers know all too well, there are many different types of risks and playing it safe can come at the cost of diversity, innovation and long-term success.

What do you think makes a good engineer?

Have you thought about what makes a good engineer? Spending time defining this is important because it helps you start to articulate how important innovation is, how important new ideas and perspectives are and how approaching a difficult problem in different ways can often lead to a much more effective and sustainable engineering design or solution.

I would often go to engineering conferences and hear other managers bemoan how difficult it is to recruit a diverse engineering team and how they “couldn’t find diverse CVs” and how “it was all so hard”. And because some of the other managers agreed, it almost became an accepted state of affairs and justified a lack of action. But for me, STEM Returners changed all this. They have such a positive and transformational approach to engineering recruitment, and they helped me in my role to create a strong, diverse engineering team.