Hiring skilled people for electronics and embedded systems companies: where to find them and how to test them

A unit that builds smart meter boards needs six operators, a test technician and a hardware engineer in the same month. It posts one advertisement for all three, interviews by chat and hires the most confident talkers. Six weeks on, two operators cannot read a diode's cathode band and the test technician has never clamped a board into a bed-of-nails fixture. The talent pool was not the problem. The method was.

This guide sets out where skilled people for electronics work can be found and how to test them before an offer. It complements the hiring design work in our recruitment process design offer and the people guide for electronics and embedded businesses.

• Line operators: reel loading, through-hole insertion, hand soldering, box build. Steady hands, good eyesight, patience and the habit of following a work instruction.
• Bench and test technicians: rework, functional test, fixture set-up and fault-finding with a multimeter and oscilloscope. Usually a diploma or ITI background plus bench years.
• Hardware engineers: schematic capture, layout review, bring-up and validation. Judged on boards they have personally powered up and debugged.
• Firmware developers: peripheral drivers, RTOS tasks, bootloaders and communication stacks. Judged on code they can read and debug, not on languages listed on a CV.

Each group has different sources, a different test and a different decision speed. A single advertisement for all four rarely finds any of them well.

• ITI and polytechnic placement cells for operators and technicians. Visit, show the bench and offer practical days to final-year students.
• Referrals from dependable operators, who know which cousin or neighbour has a steady hand. Thank them openly when a referral clears probation.
• Former staff who parted amicably, especially rework and test people who moved away for a family reason or an easier journey.
• Engineering college project labs for junior hardware and firmware engineers. Ask faculty which students built and debugged real boards for their final project.
• Electronics repair markets and service centres for technicians who already fault-find all day on mobile and appliance boards.
• Maker meet-ups and public code repositories for firmware developers who build things for fun.

1. 1

   Operators: sort, place and handle

   Hand over a tray of mixed parts and a bare board. Ask the candidate to pick out polarity marks, place a few through-hole parts and move the board with a wrist strap on. Watch care as much as speed.

2. 2

   Solderers: a practice board under magnification

   A short task on through-hole joints and a few small chip parts. Inspect them under the line's own microscope setting and photograph every joint.

3. 3

   Test technicians: a board with a planted fault

   Give a known faulty board, a multimeter, a bench supply and the schematic. Have the candidate narrate each measurement as they hunt for the fault.

4. 4

   Hardware engineers: critique a schematic

   Share a simple schematic with a few deliberate errors, such as a missing pull-up or a reversed regulator. Ask which checks they would run before layout and before first power-on.

5. 5

   Firmware developers: read and debug

   A short interrupt routine with a bug, or a logic analyser capture of a failed I2C transaction to explain. Ask for reasoning aloud rather than a perfect answer.

Candidate and role: ________.
Task given and its version: ________.
Static and safety habits seen: good, needs work or missing.
Result against the pass sample: pass, borderline or fail.
Method and reasoning explained: clear, partial or unclear.
Time taken, noted but never scored alone: ________.
First and second assessor initials: ________.
Decision and one-line reason: ________.

Fix the pass standard before the first candidate sits down. Two assessors score separately, then compare. Keep the photographs on file. For the interview conversation itself, a structured scorecard for interviewers sits comfortably beside the practical sheet.

Skilled technicians and engineers usually hold more than one option. Aim to give a decision within days of the test, not weeks. Make the offer clear on shift, grade and the first month's training. Then hand the scoring sheet to whoever will onboard the new joiner, so they know which gaps to work on first.

The process pages on hiring loops for connected-device firms and selection for high-volume product assembly show how the same approach bends for engineering-heavy and line-heavy businesses.

Write a separate notice for each group, in the language candidates actually use. For operators, name the shift pattern, the transport, the canteen and the training period, and say that a short practical task forms part of selection. For technicians, list the instruments and fixtures on your bench. For engineers, name the microcontroller families, the toolchain and the kind of boards they will bring up. Specific notices attract fewer applications, but far more of them fit.

• Testing only speed, so careful candidates lose to fast but sloppy ones.
• Letting one assessor decide alone on taste.
• Using a practice board that looks nothing like your products.
• Leaving a strong candidate waiting a fortnight while the plant head is travelling.