re: Engineering New Hires

Call every hiring manager and have him express interest. My company is getting 10 legit reqs for every opening at this point. Need to do something to stand out…

Good luck with poverty.

We finance in America. We do not build. Finance. And don’t forget the healthcare fraud/subsidy. It is fun to say STEM in a valley girl accent but at the end of the day we don’t design anything. Some guy on the opposite side of the world js just as happy to do it for five bucks and doesn’t get stigmatized for living at home with his extended family while doing it.

My understanding in talking with fellow coworkers who recruit for internships, co-ops and grads, and in talking with my own kid about his/her classmates, is the market might be the worst it’s been since COVID summer shutdowns for graduating engineers.

Tell your son to keep plugging away and apply for anything and everything. Oil & gas to aerospace to defense to transportation to agriculture. All of it.

All we cared about was can you make drawings and can you proficiently use the design software.

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I asked about that and he said there were not.


So he lied.

How much weed was this baw smoking that he flat out refused to get an internship?

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ME here, graduated in '88 with 14 job offers when I quit interviewing.

Things have changed. A LOT. Most of it since COVID. One of mine graduated EE from a top school last year, another is a SO in computer engineering looking for internships.

1. Career centers, from what I can tell now, are nearly worthless. No one interviews on campus any more outside of job fairs - see next bullet.

2. Job fairs are pure luck. Student has enough time to stand in line for maybe 3-4 companies over a couple of hours, and if you misalign just a tiny bit with what the company wants, you've wasted all that time in line.

3. More online openings are there just for resume gathering than not.

4. If you don't check a DEI box - and apparently white female is no longer one of them - then prepare to submit a LOT of resumes.

5. Use Resume Worded or something similar to get past ATS AI scanners. You won't without it. No matter how many combined decades of experience your engineering exec dad and his HR friend have between them.

6. Even with all that, expect to spend 1/2 hr to 1 hour per opening finding the opening then tailoring your resume and cover letter to fit. With a full engineering class load, it is very hard to get more than 10 done per week, and you probably need to do 100.

All that to say, a lot of engineering students graduate without jobs today. My oldest found their job one week prior to grad, and was more of an outlier in a very large graduating class than not. Internships and co-op positions are every bit as big of a PITA.

Thanks, everyone for the inputs/advice. I've been on him also to get more proactive and aggressive. He's narrowed his search to a group of defense contractors here in town. And is reworkng his resume to align with the openings. Working in a development/ integration lab environment testing hardware and software prior to fielding....pretty much the same as I did. He's marginally proficient in Japanese having taken as many college courses as possible as well as six weeks study in Japan. He wants to eventually find something that combines the engineering with the language.

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If you don't check a DEI box

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Don't forget the disability box. A "target" of hiring 7% disabled workers was "suggested" by FedGov, and the disability form has been demanded in 99% or more of private job apps I've submitted in the last year. It's how millennials would define disability, not how Gen X would. So there are plenty of ways to declare yourself now, or in the past, disabled, (ADD, etc. qualify) and you don't need to have been diagnosed for the form.) Went to a counselor because your high school girlfriend dumped you when you went to college? Check the box.

Two weeks ago the CEO of an indie chemical company told me that new grads lacked critical thinking skills and relied on AI and/or Google to point and click solutions. In his opinion he hasn't seen any who are worth hiring

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CEO of an indie chemical company

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Why is the CEO is hiring entry level engineers? They need to delegate.

Also needs to get on the arse of his intern-coop sponsors/mentors for not making them better.

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The US Navy would love to hire mechanical engineers.

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This is the way to go