Writing an Engineering Job Spec That Gets Filled

Lead with the work, not the company

Engineers evaluate roles by the work. Three paragraphs of company history before the first mention of what the person will actually do loses the readers you most want, because strong candidates are skimming several specs and yours has told them nothing by paragraph three.

Open with the deliverable. What will this person produce, on what kind of project, at what scale? "Roadway design for state DOT projects, plans through PS&E, typically $5–50M construction value" tells a qualified candidate more in one line than a page of culture copy.

Separate must-have from nice-to-have, honestly

This is the single highest-leverage change available to most specs. An undifferentiated requirements list reads as fifteen mandatory conditions, and the strongest candidates — who read carefully and self-select out rather than apply speculatively — are exactly the ones you lose to it.

Apply one test to every must-have: does the role genuinely fail without it? If someone could do this job well while lacking it, it is a nice-to-have. Most lists shrink by half under that test, and the search speeds up correspondingly.

Be precise about licensure and certification

"PE preferred" is ambiguous in a costly way. Candidates cannot tell whether an unlicensed application will be read, so some qualified people skip it and some unqualified people apply.

State the actual position: PE required at hire, PE required within a defined period, EIT acceptable with a path to licensure, or licensure not required. Name the state if the licence must be held in a particular one. The same precision applies to inspection certifications — say which ones and to which state's programme.

• PE required in [state] at time of hire
• PE required within 12 months; EIT considered
• EIT / unlicensed considered — work performed under a licensed engineer
• NICET Level [n] in [subfield], or state-specific inspector qualification required

Publish the range

Several states now require pay ranges in postings, and the direction of travel is clear regardless of where you are. But the argument for publishing is practical rather than legal: without a range, you and the candidate discover a mismatch after two interviews instead of before the first.

Post a range you would actually pay within. A range so wide it is meaningless does the same damage as no range, because it fails to filter.

Say what's true about location

"Hybrid" and "flexible" mean nothing without specifics, and specs that are vague on location generate a predictable volume of wasted conversations. Say how many days on site, at which office, and whether that is negotiable. If the work is field-based, say what proportion and what travel radius.

For inspection and construction roles this is not a preference detail, it is the core requirement — the work happens at a fixed place on a fixed schedule, and a spec that soft-pedals that will surface candidates who cannot take the job.

A structure that works

Nothing here is novel. It is simply ordered by what a candidate needs in order to decide, rather than by what the organisation wants to say.

• One-line role summary: discipline, project type, location
• What you'll work on: three to five bullets of actual deliverables
• Must-haves: short, defensible, licensure stated precisely
• Nice-to-haves: clearly labelled as such
• Compensation range and benefits summary
• Location and on-site expectation, stated concretely
• The hiring process: how many stages, over what timeframe