How to hire engineers faster

When clients ask what a vacancy costs them, they usually mean agency fees and advertising. That’s only part of it.

What an empty role really costs

The CIPD’s 2026 survey put the median cost of a hire at £2,000 for employees below senior management, and £3,500 for senior managers, including advertising, agency fees and in-house time. That’s before you count the work.

In service and maintenance, an empty role means:

• Overtime for the rest of the team. That has limits. Workers can’t average more than 48 hours a week, normally over 17 weeks, unless they’ve opted out in writing.
• Subcontractors or agency engineers to cover planned maintenance.
• Booked work at risk. We recently spoke to a client whose subcontract team left at short notice, leaving work booked in for months ahead with no one to do it.
• Pressure on the engineers who are still there, which is how one vacancy turns into two.

You’ll often see a figure of £30,614 quoted as the cost of replacing an employee. It comes from a 2014 study of law, accountancy, IT, media and retail, not engineering, so I don’t use it.

The market for good engineers

Overall, UK candidate supply rose at its fastest rate for three months in August 2026, according to KPMG and the REC, driven largely by redundancies. That’s not the picture for skilled engineers.

In the government’s UK Employer Skills Survey 2024, 48% of skilled trades vacancies were hard to fill because applicants lacked the skills, qualifications or experience needed. Uptime Institute’s 2026 global survey found 53% of data centre operators struggled to find qualified candidates, up from 46% a year earlier, and 28% had lost staff to competitors.

The engineers you want are rarely short of options, and many are in more than one process.

Where processes lose people

In our experience it’s rarely one big mistake. It’s the gaps:

• A week waiting for feedback after the first interview.
• A second interview that can’t be booked because the right person is on leave.
• An offer that has to go back for sign-off.
• A salary range decided after the interview rather than before.

Each gap is a chance for another offer to land first. We’ve seen candidates cancel interviews because they’d already accepted elsewhere. In the CIPD’s 2026 survey, over half of employers said candidates had accepted an offer and then pulled out at least some of the time.

What a fast process looks like

Agree the range and sign-off before you start. Know what you can pay, what you’d stretch to for the right person and who approves the offer.

Two stages is usually enough. A screen and a combined technical and manager interview, with a site visit if it matters.

Book interview slots in advance. Put two or three dates in the diary before the first CV arrives.

Give feedback within a day. Even if it’s “we’re still deciding”, say so.

Make the offer in writing, quickly. One client recently decided to offer on the day of the interview rather than wait.

Stay in touch through the notice period. Most engineers have a month’s notice, some two, and senior hires can be three to six months. A call from the manager before they start makes a real difference.

Fast doesn’t mean lower standards

None of this means skipping the technical interview or hiring the first person through the door. It means making the decisions you’d make anyway, sooner.

It also helps to be open on sector experience. Some of the best hires we’ve made came from a different part of the industry, with the employer training them on its own kit.

If you’ve got a role that needs filling, talk to us. We’ll tell you straight how long we think it’ll take.

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Sources: CIPD, Resourcing and Talent Planning (Sept 2026); gov.uk, Maximum weekly working hours; KPMG and REC, UK Report on Jobs (Sept 2026); DfE, Employer Skills Survey 2024; Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2026; Oxford Economics for Unum, The Cost of Brain Drain (2014).