Why your engineer vacancies sit open for months

The advert went up in April. Multi-skilled maintenance engineer, 4 on 4 off, competitive salary. It's October now.

You've had three CVs. One was a forklift driver. One wanted days only. One looked good, came for interview, and took a job down the road for two grand more before you'd sent the offer.

Meanwhile the rest of the team has covered the gap. Six months of overtime, a few long nights on breakdowns, and the PPM list getting longer every week.

Engineers are hard to find. But most posts that sit open for months have the same handful of faults, and most of them are on the hiring side.

The advert reads like every other advert

Read yours as an engineer would, on their phone, on a break.

"Competitive salary." Every engineer reading that assumes it means low. "Dynamic, busy site." They read that as short-staffed. A list of 15 must-haves, from PLC fault-finding to a forklift licence to "a can-do attitude". Nobody ticks all 15, so the good ones don't apply.

Put the pay in. Put the shift pattern in, with the hours. Say what the kit is: the sorter make, the PLCs, the drives. Say how big the team is and who they'd be on shift with. That tells an engineer more in four lines than a page of company history.

Be careful with the extras you throw in. GOV.UK's guidance for employers says to only use phrases like "recent graduate" or "highly experienced" when "these are actual requirements of the job" (GOV.UK). Asking for 15 years' experience when five would do is bad recruiting. It can also put you on the wrong side of discrimination law. Our guide to writing an engineer job advert that gets replies has more.

The pay is last year's number

The salary on the advert usually comes from the last person in the post, plus a bit. That person may have started five years ago.

Engineers know what the market pays. They talk to each other, and the agencies ring them every week. If the site down the road pays more for the same shift pattern, you won't hear from the people you want. Check what engineers earn in your area before you set the number, not after six months of silence.

Shift premiums matter as much as the base. So does overtime, and whether it's paid at a rate or just "available". So does the call-out payment if the job has an on-call rota.

The process is too slow

Here's where most vacancies die. The candidate is good. They apply on a Monday. HR screens the CV by Friday. The manager is on a shutdown, so the interview is three weeks later. Then there's a second interview. Then the offer needs sign-off from someone who's on holiday.

A good engineer who's looking will have two or three offers inside that time. They take the first decent one.

Fix it with dates, not good intentions:

• CVs looked at by the engineering manager within two working days
• one interview, with a practical part, inside a week of applying
• an offer, or a no, inside two days of the interview

And remember the clock keeps running after they say yes. They still have to work their notice. By law that's at least a week if they've been in the job more than a month* (GOV.UK). Most contracts say a month or more. So a post that takes three months to fill on paper takes four in practice.

You're fishing in one pond

Most sites look for someone who's done the exact job on the exact kit. That pool is small, and every site nearby is fishing in it.

Widen it. A mechanical fitter from a food plant can learn your conveyors. An electrician from building services can learn your panels with some support. Ex-forces engineers come with good fault-finding habits and work well on shifts. Our post on hiring from other industries goes into how.

That means accepting some training time. Six months of a capable person learning your kit beats another six months of an empty post.

Count what the gap is costing

Here's our view. Most sites never add up what an open post costs, so nobody feels the urgency.

Put it on paper. The overtime the team has done to cover. The breakdowns that ran longer because the one person who knew the machine was on a rest day. The PPM that slipped. The fitter who's now looking elsewhere because they're tired of covering. Our article on the real cost of a vacant engineer post has a way to work it out.

When the number's in front of you, two things get easier. Paying a bit more to fill the post. And paying for cover while you look. A good contract engineer on the shift with the gap can hold the line steady, and stop the rest of the team burning out (cover while you recruit).

The worst outcome is the one most sites drift into. The post stays open, the team carries it, and then a second engineer hands in their notice. Now you've got two gaps. The next breakdown on nights is the one where nobody on shift knows the machine.

What to do on Monday

1. Rewrite the advert with the pay, the shift pattern, the hours and the kit in the first four lines.
2. Check the salary against what nearby sites are paying for the same pattern now.
3. Set dates for every step, from CV to offer, and hold yourself to them.
4. Add up what the open post has cost since it went up, and take that number to whoever signs off pay.

* Minimum notice period correct as of 8 October 2026. Check GOV.UK for the latest.