This is a guest post from our partner marketplace partner Saberr

In a strongly bonded team, good ideas grow without force and bad ideas die without remorse. From Pixar to SpaceX, cultivating ideas is what makes today’s most innovative teams succeed.

It’s no wonder that innovation and strong teams have become the top strategic goal for most companies. Unstable markets, fickle customers, disruption by nimble startups and exponential change in technology all call for companies to be innovative in how they operate and serve customers.

But why innovate?

Innovative teams are not just about more ideas: they are about recognizing good ideas and acting on them. Innovation also manifests itself in different ways. An innovative sales team will constantly work on improving their activation metric by experimenting with novel approaches, whilst an innovative product team will come up with next best thing. Yet both will matter greatly to revenues and staying relevant in the marketplace. But the ingredients, the ideas, aren’t enough. The process matters even more, and that process is all about people interacting. It’s about people laughing around a whiteboard and it’s about people nodding as somebody speaks. The process is all about relationships.

So if you can often recognize innovation when you see it after the fact, how can you recognize ‘innovators’ when hiring?

Where do good ideas come from?

Professor Sandy Pentland from MIT puts forward a compelling vision of what innovation in teams looks like in his “Social Physics: How good ideas spread” book. It’s a team where:

1. Everybody in the team forms supportive relationships with one another, all of similar strength. This is easy to assess in an established team, so the key in a hiring context is to try and forecast it.
2. People in the team are broadly connected outside of that team. They maintain relationships to different social circles unrelated to the team or each other. They use these connections to discover new ideas. This is what makes them Superconnectors.
3. They bring those new ideas back into the team to innovate in both solutions and process.

So what does an innovation-helping hire like?

Putting this together we know that we want candidates to be Superconnectors in order to bring in the broadest set of ideas. We also want them to have strong relationships with their team to churn and grow those ideas in an “anything goes” environment.

To achieve this when hiring:

1. Hire broadly, and hire broadly connected people.

Make sure you recruit from different sources: if you are always hunting on LinkedIn you are limiting the number of social circles you can connect to.

Ask people during the interview “where do your best ideas come from?” or “who do you listen to for inspiration?”. If their answers are always to do with people at work then they are probably not going to connect you to many other networks.

2. Hire for great relationships.

Bringing in great ideas is of no use if they can’t be aired in a supportive environment, and constructively attacked without harm. Hiring people who will quickly form solid relationships throughout the whole team is really important in order to get this environment in place. This is where Saberr can help with our “relationship forecasting” assessment.

Summary

Remember the kitten rules of innovation: “We love each other in the basket, but somebody gotta reach outside the basket for ideas.”

Being San Francisco-based, we at SmartRecruiters want to extend a warm welcome to the 26,000 Game Developers Conference attendees in the City this week. But we want to send more than just best wishes! So here are some insights gleaned from the big data that has recently passed through the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Platform.

Jobs in the gaming industry are thriving, making recruiting a critical success factor for gaming companies. While a global industry, more than half the jobs being recruited over the past 12 months are in California, with 82% of those in the Bay Area. IOW, almost half (48%) of the video game jobs are in the greater Silicon Valley region. Washington, Utah, New York, Louisiana and Florida also have significant recruiting activity, albeit not in the realm of Silicon Valley or California in general.

Engineering dominates as the top function being recruited, with fully 36% of the jobs being recruited focused on this technical core. However, Design and Art/Creative follow closely behind, accounting for 28% of gaming industry jobs between them.

Indeed is the job board that generates more than half of all gaming job candidates, followed by LinkedIn, which provides 18% of all candidates.

Finally, the SmartRecruiters TA Platform is an increasingly popular system for achieving hiring success in this brutally competitive talent market, in part because its recruitment marketing capabilities provide seamless connections to Indeed and LinkedIn. Gaming savvy recruiters will also appreciate the countless other “cheat mode” features that the SmartRecruiters TA Platform gives them in the war for talent. Indeed, top game developers like Ubisoft, Gameloft, Animus Interactive, NYX Gaming and Epoch Gaming are among the many who thrive with the SmartRecruiters TAP.

Gamers, have a great GDC this week!

Ubisoft is a billion-euro creator of world-renowned gaming and entertainment brands, but rolling out a new talent acquisition system around the globe is not a game. Fortunately it’s much easier than one might expect when the system is SmartRecruiters.

Jerome Ternynck of SmartRecruiters recently caught up with Ubisoft’s Sébastien Bourguignon to discuss the roll-out. In the resulting video, Sébastien talks about hiring gaming developers and other specialized talent in Europe, North America, Asia and elsewhere.

He comments how “attracting the most interesting ones is sometimes difficult”. He also emphasizes the importance of collaboration between recruiters and hiring teams. Another interesting point Sébastien makes is the importance of having all recruiting data and processes on one global platform in order to manage a global process.

One key reason Ubisoft selected SmartRecruiters, according to Sébastien, is that it is “powerful but still easy to use: easy to use for our candidates, easy to use for our recruiters, easy to use for our hiring managers.”

Architecturally, Sébastien comments favorably about the openness of SmartRecruiters, important for connecting with external services and internal HRIS.

“Surprising” is how Sébastien describes the global big-bang deployment that Ubisoft is undertaking: surprising how easy it is proving to be.

Here is a link to the video on YouTube.

Beyond the video, you can learn more about Ubisoft’s SmartRecruiters decision in a recent press release.

Finding qualified candidates may seem like the hardest part of the hiring funnel, but what about the grueling and lengthy interview process? It’s no surprise that most candidates find the process broken or inefficient, and this rings especially true for developers.

Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey provided us with specific information regarding developer’s feelings on interviews, allowing us to convey to recruiters and hiring managers alike what changes they can make to effectively interview technical candidates. Here are just a few mistakes to avoid when interviewing developer candidates for your company.

1. Ignoring the Pre-Interview Stage

35% of developers we surveyed said they wanted to be better prepared for the interview ahead of time, including being informed of who they will be speaking with. In the grand scheme of things, this is an easy fix for most recruiters and hiring managers. Sending out a quick email with the basic details (who they will be speaking with, how long the interviews are expected to last, etc.) ensures that the candidate is well-prepared and content, and only takes a few minutes on your end. Modern applicant tracking systems like SmartRecruiters even allow you to send the interview agenda and details to the candidate automatically, right after scheduling the interview, making this step easy and effortless. This pre-interview preparation also allows the candidate to ask questions before the interview, saving you both time and confusion in the long run.

2. Not Introducing Them to Anyone

47% of developers we surveyed said they wanted to be introduced to the team during the interview process. Programmers will pay very close attention to the people they meet, focusing on things like “Are they nice?” and “Are they smart?” While they don’t expect to meet everyone during their first interview, developers would ideally like to meet a few of their potential engineering team members and maybe even their future boss. Introducing them to members of the team is an easy way for candidates to get a feel of what the company culture is like as well as see if they can see themselves working closely with these people.

3. Taking Too Long to Follow Up After an Interview

We can all agree that no one likes being left hanging after a job interview. But with developers, this rings especially true. If the candidate didn’t get the job, communicating early on eliminates stress and uncertainty and allows the candidate to continue their job search. On the flip side, if you are interested in moving forward with a candidate you need to do it quickly – developers are in high demand and likely to have offers from multiple companies on their plate. Developers who are proactively searching for their next job don’t stay available for very long, and those who aren’t looking are constantly being recruited.

Ready to find technical candidates to interview?

Stack Overflow is the trusted destination site for software developers to find, ask, and answer programming questions. Stack Overflow helps employers reach, attract, and engage talent while helping developers find jobs they love.

With its seamless integration with SmartRecruiters, in a few minutes you can create your job ad and put it in front of millions of developers with targeted job listings.

Access Stack Overflow’s page on the Marketplace and make them a part of your hiring success today!

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This article was written by Rachel Maleady, Content Marketing Writer at Stack Overflow, where she covers topics ranging from recruiting to employer branding in the tech industry.

Hiring developers is a challenge for recruiters. Resumes do a bad job conveying a developer’s actual coding skill. And if you need to hire a lot of developers, you need to wade through a lot of bad resume data. To hire without headaches, you need a system to understand how good developers are and to arrange piles of resumes into a useful order to start your interview process.

However, what is the best way to assess coding skills? The traditional way of asking developers to write code on a whiteboard is usually a bad idea. First, there’s a limitation on how complex you can go by writing on a whiteboard. Second, developers want to be assessed on their skills in a normal coding situation: they generally don’t like to be put into unusual social situations where they have to write code on a whiteboard, in a way that doesn’t match any normal coding process. Developers want to be assessed on their skills in a normal coding situation.

Now there is a smarter way of assessing coding skills. Thanks to the new partnership between SmartRecruiters and Codility, you can trigger online coding assessments to your candidates in seconds.

Enter Codility to solve your developer hiring headaches

Codility makes finding candidates and testing their’ coding skills and coding behavior simple. By using Codility before you go through the time consuming task of interviewing candidates you can:

• Avoid sending people who can’t code to your development team and wasting their time.
• Start your interview process from the best coders first, reducing your time-to-hire by up to 70%.

How Codility Works

Codility creates and maintains a curated library of programming tasks. You pick the tasks that match your recruitment needs and send them to your candidates to complete online. Codility then automatically assesses the resulting code to filter the candidates with the best coding skills.. You get a clear score back for each candidate and you can choose to start interviewing from those who score the best!

And it’s the best of both worlds – your candidates get to do what they love: to write a piece of software in a normal environment instead of being trapped, sweating at a whiteboard.

So far Codility has given well over 2 million code assessments and we help companies like Sony, PayPal, EA, Nokia, Samsung, MIT and Intel with their hiring

With Codility you test fundamental coding skills

A great technical hire is someone who is a good programmer at their core and can apply their skills to any problem or task. After all, you don’t want to end up with someone who can luckily pass your company specific test but then can’t code your next project.

Deploying Codility tests inside SmartRecruiters

Codility is excited to partner to SmartRecruiters. Our passion is narrow but deep: automated programming skills assessment to deliver a great experience to candidates and boost your productivity. SmartRecruiters shares the same passion: their TA platform delivers an unparalleled mobile and social candidate experience that engages hiring managers along the way, supercharging recruiter productivity.

Our partnership allows you to make Codility tests an integral part of your hiring process in SmartRecruiters, empowering recruiters to automatically trigger assessments and see the test results right from the candidate profile page inside SmartRecruiters. Easy, simple, no sweat required!

You can either send a candidate an assessment directly from the candidate’s profile page, or incorporate assessments into your workflow. Check below three easy steps to have Codility as part of your hiring process:

1. In the hiring process page, add “Skills Test” as a new step. Remember that Corporate plan customers have the convenience of creating a specific hiring process for combinations of org fields. In other words, you can specify a workflow with for the Engineering department in France if you’d like.

2. After adding the new step, click on the gear icon on the upper right part of the icon. A new page will open where you can choose you assessment vendor and test. Choose “Codility” and select the test you prefer to be added to your hiring step.

3.  After hitting “save”, Codility assessments will be automatically triggered to you candidates, without any headaches. You can follow up the status and results of the assessments in the lower right hand corner of your candidates’ profiles.

Like the idea but need some more insight?

Learn more about using Codility in SmartRecruiters here, and have a Codility expert contact you to run you through the system and/or put you in touch with other users to talk about good practices!

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This article was written by Stephen Croome at Codility, who helps tell the story of a company which helps you understand how good a developer really is.

We at SmartRecruiters have always been the first talent acquisition platform to deliver the deepest level of integration with LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions products, including a seamless LinkedIn Apply process, one-click LinkedIn job posting, support for managed LinkedIn contracts and the best LinkedIn Recruiter integration in the market. About that last, it’s bi-directional and real time.  

Now we’re first to integrate with the new LinkedIn Referrals offering that Jeff Weiner announced today at Talent Connect. To be clear, we’re not announcing a future integration. SmartRecruiters is live today with a seamless two-way integration to LinkedIn Referrals.

Want to see it in action? Check out this short video of the live integration.

This big news validates our belief that if you are all-in on LinkedIn as a pillar of your TA strategy, SmartRecruiters is the most all-in talent acquisition platform for you to use. The synergy between us is both powerful and pragmatic.

Let’s start with the fact that employee referrals are your best source of hire. They produce better quality candidates, better retention and better performance than any other channel.

Now let’s look at what a successful Employee Referral program requires. I recently blogged about the survey results from across a variety of industries that identified four essential criteria that must be met from an employee perspective:

1. Tell me what jobs are open.
2. Show me which of my friends might be worth referring.
3. Make it is easy to make a referral.
4. Tell me what happened to my friend.

Oh and 5) the bonus helps. But that’s not why I refer people.

Looking at this list, it’s pretty clear why we are excited. The combination of LinkedIn Referrals and SmartRecruiters checks all the boxes for a successful ERP.

1) Tell me what jobs are open.

All jobs published in SmartRecruiters are automatically synced with the new LinkedIn Referrals portal so employees always have an accurate view.

2) Show me which of my friends might be worth referring.

This is of course where the power of LinkedIn’s network comes into play. The new LinkedIn Referrals shows live recommendations so employees can browse through “matches” and quickly decide who to refer. That drives greater engagement.

3) Make it is easy to make a referral.

Employees can then share a job with their friends inside LinkedIn. The candidate can express interest in SmartRecruiters using their LinkedIn profile in one easy click. This drives maximum conversions.

4) Tell me what happened to my friend.

This is where the beauty of the live synchronisation comes into play. As you take the referred candidates through the process, SmartRecruiters synchronises in real-time with LinkedIn Referrals to inform the employee when their referral is Invited for an Interview, Gets an Offer and ultimately is Hired.

On the backend, obviously we keep a clean house to make sure you are in control. The source of every candidate is properly tracked, referral candidates are de-duped and your HRIS integration can take over for onboarding and Bonus Payout, as required.

Fun fact, we did this integration in a week, leveraging the SmartRecruiters public API (link) and LinkedIn’s new middleware API. This is a prime example of Cloud providers working together.

If you are at Talent Connect today, feel free to contact me via the mobile app or Tweet me @JeromeTernynck. I will be happy to show you the demo.

Otherwise Contact Us for a demo.

User groups, or clubs that focus on a particular technology, were on the forefront of the computing revolution. Apple and Osborne Computer both had their origins in the legendary Homebrew Computer Club of Silicon Valley.

User groups still thrive today, and new groups are regularly springing up to serve new technology and opportunity. In addition to being a valuable educational resource (and a great way to honor a computing tradition), user groups present an outstanding recruiting opportunity.

Finding A Group

The best approach to finding a group in today’s internet-centric world is networking hub Meetup.com. Representing almost 20 million members in almost 200,000 groups in almost 200 countries, Meetup.com is the largest network of local groups. Solid search features and filters make it easy to find appropriate groups in your area.

For example, let’s say you have an idea for a mobile app and are looking for a developer to help you bring it to market. You would search for something like “Mobile App Development” and specify your location and a radius.

If you are near any major city and interested in a popular technology, you are likely to have many available groups from which to choose. Read the group descriptions carefully – some will be very focused on your area of interest while others only touch on it. Look for the best possible match.

Planning Your Visit

Read the bios of the members that have indicated they will be attending the event. Try and find potential matches that you think could be a good fit – you don’t want to go to the meeting and fall in love with someone that you won’t be able to get. Focus on likely candidates, note their names and try to remember their faces—everyone should have a photograph.

At The Meeting

User groups often start with the organizer asking if anyone would like to make an announcement. This may be a good opportunity for you to stand up and explain that you are looking to hire someone. It may prompt the attendees who are looking for work to seek you out later, and it will almost always prompt them into being more active during the meeting.

That is what you want. It is also the real beauty of recruiting in this kind of scenario. You get to see how potential hires work and interact with both peers (the other attendees) and authority or “management” (the organizer). It’s a valuable perspective that is very hard to get in an interview setting.

You also get a good sense of relative expertise. You will notice that some participants are highly respected and that everyone inches forward in their seats when those people speak. Others will clearly be more junior, and you’ll see that most of the rest of the group answers their questions easily.

This kind of peer review is very helpful, especially if you are not in a position to judge someone’s technical expertise yourself. And remember it’s not always the most senior person you want. Senior often means expensive, and you may be better off with a less expensive and less experienced hire that can come back to this group and get answers when they need them.

After The Meeting

Most user groups end with a social period. Sometimes pizza is brought in and people mingle. This is your chance – seek out the people that interested you. It’s OK to be direct – if you are looking for a freelancer it’s fine to say something like, “Hi. I enjoyed your comments. Do you have any hours available?”

Always have a card ready give it to them even if they aren’t interested or available. Things change quickly, and they almost certainly know other techs, so just ask that they keep you in mind if they or a friend ever has some time available.

Many user groups skip the pizza and move to a local pub. This can be a better place to approach a potential hire but try and catch them as the meeting is breaking up. Make sure they are joining the group at the pub. If they are, great – tell them you hope to speak with them there. If not get down to business right away. You don’t want to miss the opportunity to speak and have to wait until the following meeting.

This article was written by Business.com from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the hiring success platform to find and hire great people.

There are 3.9 million jobs in the U.S. affiliated with cloud computing today with 384,478 in IT alone.  The median salary for IT professionals with cloud computing experience is $90,950 and the median salary for positions that pay over $100,000 a year is $116,950.

Globally there are 18,239,258 cloud computing jobs, with the majority being in China (40.8%).

These and other key insights are from WANTED Analytics, the leading provider of data analytics on the workplace. The company currently maintains a database of more than one billion unique job listings and is collecting hiring trend data from more than 150 countries. WANTED Analytics has never been a client, they provided complimentary access based on my requesting a trial account. Forbes readers have been requesting job-related data and hiring analysis for cloud computing, which is what led me to contact them and complete this analysis.

Key Take-aways include the following:

• The Hiring Scale is 79 for IT jobs that require cloud computing skills with 9 candidates per job opening as of December 12, 2014.  The higher the Hiring Scale score, the more difficult it is for employers to find the right applicants for open positions. Nationally an average job posting for an IT professional with cloud computing expertise is open just 44 days.

• The median salary for open IT positions requiring cloud computing expertise is $90,950, with the median salary for those positions that pay over $100,000 a year being $116,950. The following graphic illustrates the distribution of salaries above $100,000 a year for IT professionals with cloud computing expertise.

• Mapping the distribution of job volume, salary range, candidate supply, posting period and hiring scale by Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) or states and counties is supported by WANTED Analytics.  The following graphic shows the distribution of job volume by MSA followed by an analysis of the top twenty markets for IT professionals with cloud computing expertise.

• IBM (NYSE:IBM), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) have the greatest number of open positions today. The following graphic shows the top fifteen cloud computing employers and the positions they have open today.

• Structured Query Language (SQL), Java, overall software development skills, Linux, JavaScript and experience with software quality assurance are the top five most in-demand skills for IT cloud computing professionals.  The following graphic provides an overview of the top 20 most in-demand skills. Please click on the graphic to expand for easier viewing.

• Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information, ProjectManagement Professional (PMP), Certified Information Systems Security professional, and Cisco Certified Network Associate are among the most in-demand cloud computing certifications today. The following graphic shows the most in-demand cloud computing certifications based on WANTED Analytics queries as of December, 2014.

• WANTED Analytics finds there are 18,239,258 cloud computing jobs globally today with 40.8% in China, 21.7% in the US and 12.2% in India.  There are 1,533,742 jobs open globally today just in IT alone based on the analysis completed.  The following graphic shows all cloud computing positions across all industries and salary ranges as of December, 2014.

This article was written by Louis Columbus from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the recruiting platform to find and hire great people.

Attracting talent to your job at the right time – that’s recruiting. SmartRecruiters’ Data Scientist Kasia Senderowska conducted the ‘When to Hire’ study. Senderowska examined a randomized cross section of 60,000+ jobs in America and Canada within the SmartRecruiters system during 2014. The study focuses on six questions:

1. “What Days of the Week Do People Apply to Jobs?”
2. “What Days of the Week Do Companies Post Jobs?”
3. “What Time of the Day Do People Apply to Jobs?”
4. “What Time of the Day Do Companies Post Jobs?”
5. “How Quickly Do Candidates Apply?”
6. “What’s the Most Popular Day to Hire?”‘

Without further ado, let’s dig into the findings. During the job search, not all days are created equal. The beginning of the week has ambitious volume. Monday and Tuesday each have double the applicant volume of Saturday and Sunday.

Tuesday is the most popular day to post your job opening. Only 9% of jobs are posted on the weekend. Each weekday is within 17-19% of total job posting volume, which is not a large variation. But take a look at the graph above, Monday through Wednesday account for 53% of candidate volume. I would consider posting your job on Sunday night or Monday morning so that your first three days can reach the largest volume of job seekers.

Now, let’s dig further into the time of day. This graph is broken down by weekend, weekday, and overall average. Interestingly, on weekends job seeker volume steadily increases throughout the day, reaching a peak volume at 8:00 pm; whereas, during the week job seekers reach peak volume at 12:00 pm.

Companies on the other hand, post jobs in a manner that closely resembles traditional business hours. The vast majority of jobs are posted between 8:00 am to 6:00 pm Monday through Friday. It’s interesting that we see a dip in job postings during lunch time because it’s the peak time for receiving job applications. Hiring managers cover a vast majority of job titles, which means hiring too often is treated as an afterthought. Notice the sharp uptick in job postings from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm as hiring managers attempt to squeeze recruiting into the end of the workday.

Across all jobs, 70% of candidates apply within the first 11 days. People who hire know that recruiting is all about timing. Staffing and HR find and apply to jobs faster than any other industry. Also notice that High Tech candidates (an in-demand demographic) is slower to apply to jobs. With High Tech, companies often open more sourcing channels, such as recruitment firms and employee referrals.

But what is recruiting leading up to? Making that next hire. 96% of hires are made during the week. And Monday is the most popular day to make a hiring decision. This makes sense to me, as starting a new chapter is your career or creating a new role is much like starting a new week. Also note Friday, is the lowest weekday by a wide margin. Have you ever hired on a Friday? What’s your favorite day to hire?

What do these ‘When to Hire’ graphs teach you? Lets keep the conversation going. You are welcome to republish any of these graphs on your blog or website with proper accreditation. If you have any data requests, tweet @SmartRecruiters.

Lets make a timely and data informed world of recruiting.

Not pre-med. Not business. Not computer science. The most popular college major choice for high school seniors surveyed by CareerBuilder—the majority of whom already have a career in mind—is engineering.

We can debate how many of these students will stick with engineering when they get their first homework assignments in college. But let’s assume most of them don’t move to less rigorous majors. Which engineering field should they choose? What are the most in-demand engineering jobs in the U.S. based on job growth, hires, and job posting activity? And which ones have the oldest workforces that will need to be replaced sometime in the next five to 10 years?

To answer these questions, we looked at labor market data and job postings analytics from EMSI for all 18 engineering occupations classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and all eight engineering technicians occupations (which are primarily middle-skill positions). Both categories, despite the difference in educational requirements and median pay, are adding a bunch of jobs post-recession and are key STEM occupation groups. But they tell a different story when comparing job postings from employers and hiring that’s taken place.

Engineers

First, a few big-picture data trends:

The U.S. has approximately 1.6 million engineering jobs that pay $42 per hour in median wages. Civil engineers account for the most jobs of any engineering field (274,000 in 2014), followed closely by mechanical engineers (264,000) and industrial engineers (229,000). Those three engineering jobs, plus electrical engineers and electronics engineers, make up two-thirds of the American engineering workforce.

Job growth from 2010 to 2014 has been in the double digits in four occupations: petroleum engineers (30%), mining and geological engineers (12%), biomedical engineers (10%), and industrial engineers (10%). But every engineering occupation has added jobs, the most coming among mechanical engineers (21,500 new jobs since 2010). As a whole, engineering jobs have grown 7%.

The most-concentrated metropolitan area for engineers (among the 125 largest MSAs) is Huntsville, Alabama, which is home to a NASA flight center and other aerospace and military establishments. Huntsville has 5.1 times more engineers per capita than the national average. Next is San Jose (3.5 times the national average), Palm-Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Florida (2.9), and Detroit (2.75). In general, the South (Huntsville; Augusta, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina) and the Rust Belt (Detroit, Dayton, etc.) are the densest areas for engineers.

The output of engineering graduates was at a standstill in the early 2000s. But since ’07, completions nationwide have shot up 33%, from 108,000 to 144,000.

Just over 20% of 2013 engineering grads were non-resident aliens, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, with the majority (113,620, or 78%) U.S. citizens. And about 80% were men.

Oldest Occupations

Occupations with older workforces are potential targets for labor shortages. Not all workers 65 and above will retire at the same time, so the doom-and-gloom scenarios that get tossed around likely won’t become reality. Yet if the demand for workers continues and if a good-sized segment of that workforce is poised to retire, skills gaps are likely to become a real issue—especially at senior or management-level positions that are hard to recruit for. We’ve documented this trend in the skilled trades, and it’s just as relevant in engineering.

Two of the fastest-growing engineering fields also staff two of the largest proportions of older workers: industrial engineers and petroleum engineers. In both, 25% of currently employed workers are 55 years or older. Industrial engineers are vital to many manufacturing firms that struggle to find the right technically oriented talent, so the aging workforce is a threat. Petroleum engineering, meanwhile, has had a noticeable undersupply of graduates coming into the marketplace in the last few years, with just 1,600 completions in 2013 compared to EMSI’s yearly job openings estimate of 3,500.

The engineering occupation with the oldest workforce is also one of the smallest in terms of jobs: marine engineers and naval architects. Only 8,000 of these jobs are in the U.S., but 29% are 55 years or older. The youngest occupations, on the other side, are computer hardware engineers and agricultural engineers; just 12% of the current workforce in each is 55 or over.

Job Postings vs. Hires

We’ve given the lay of the land for engineers with traditional labor market data, an essential step for any workforce analysis. But EMSI’s new job posting analytics gives an additional context and perspective into the demand and hiring activity for engineers.

For instance, one thing we can quickly see is that de-duplicated online job postings exceeded average hiring on a monthly basis for all engineers from January 2012 to July 2014. This is an indication, perhaps, that the pool of skilled talent nationally isn’t keeping up with employer demand. The best example of this is perhaps industrial engineers, an occupation with three times more unique monthly postings (24,740) than average monthly hires (7,737) since the start of 2012. These excess postings could represent real vacancies.

Conversely, hiring is outpacing posting for civil engineers (13,657 monthly hires to 6,025 postings), as well as engineers, all other and nuclear engineers. These and other engineering occupations could be under-represented in online job postings, meaning that employers find alternative ways to recruit for these positions.

The Bottom Line

Considering all of this data, civil engineers and few smaller specialty fields (petroleum engineers, biomedical engineers, and nuclear engineers) are no doubt in-demand nationally. Hiring and job growth is strong for civil engineering, and petroleum engineering combines the highest wages, fastest growth, oldest workforce, and smallest supply of graduates.

For colleges and workforce professionals who want to get the most clarity on skills gaps and employer demand, we recommend exploring regional data and engaging local employers. Read more about that in our analysis for JP Morgan Chase’s New Skills at Work initiative.

Engineering Technicians

How are things different for engineering technicians? First, far fewer engineering technicians are in the labor market (an estimated 450,000 in 2014) than engineers (1.6 million). They also have considerably smaller median wages ($26 per hour vs. $42 per hour).

Still, engineering technician jobs shouldn’t be dismissed. Each of these occupations—including the largest: electrical engineering technicians—have a lower barrier to entry than standard engineering jobs since they typically require an associate’s degree. This makes these STEM-related training areas very important for community and technical colleges. And several of these jobs are growing at a rapid clip, led by mechanical engineering technicians and environmental engineering technicians (both up 9% from 2010 to 2014). Collectively, engineering technician jobs have jumped 4%.

The growth of engineering technicians has been strongest in Detroit (27% since 2010), but Houston, Seattle, and Portland have also seen double-digit employment growth. Most of the Rust Belt, as the green on the map below indicates, is experiencing job growth after severe layoffs during the recession.

Oldest Occupations

Overall, engineering technicians have a younger workforce than traditional engineers. While about a third of engineering techs are 45-54, there are fewer 55-and-older workers in these mid-skill fields (21% compared to 23% for engineers). For context, 19% of all traditional salaried employees in the U.S. are 55-plus.

Aerospace engineering technicians have the oldest workforce of all technician positions (23% are 55 and older). Electrical engineering technicians, industrial engineering technicians, and mechanical engineering technicians (as well as technicians, all other) are at 22%.

Job Postings vs. Hires

In contrast to engineers, there have been more hires than postings for engineering technicians. Just about twice as many, in fact, from January 2012 to July 2014. This makes sense given that employers are less likely to scour the internet for available technicians than they are for highly skilled engineers.

Like civil engineers, civil engineering technicians are under-represented in job postings compared to hires. There were five hires for every unique job postings over our time frame. Engineering technicians, all other, had an even bigger hires-to-postings ratio.

The number of employed civil engineering techs in the workforce dropped slightly from 2010 to 2014 (from 72,500 to 71,700). But employers have been more active in posting for these jobs (unique postings were up 50% from January 2012 to July 2014), while posting intensity—a ratio of total postings to de-duplicated postings—is lower (3-to-1) than all engineering technician occupations (4-to-1).

We also examined job posting analytics for Detroit, since it’s such a huge growth area for engineering technicians. Hires eclipsed job postings by a 3-to-1 ratio from January 2012 to July 2014. The majority of top companies posting for technician positions in Detroit are staffing companies—further evidence of the link between manufacturing and temp employment that we wrote about earlier this year.

The Bottom Line

Hot engineering technician jobs tend to follow the patterns of their related engineering fields: mechanical engineering technicians are growing just like mechanical engineers, and the same goes for civil engineering technicians and civil engineers. For both engineers and engineering techs, the demand from employers appears to be strong. But the demand for all engineering occupations isn’t the same, just like not all regions need these types of the workers as badly as some.

This article was written by (Director of marketing and PR at EMSI) Joshua Wright from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.