What Critical Competencies to Look For in Field Service Candidates

Where are all the field workers? A four-part blog series examines the shortage of skilled technicians and offers tips for keeping the roster filled with top performers.

As the labor shortage continues to be a top challenge for field service organizations, innovative hiring managers are learning to adjust their hiring criteria and seek candidates with great potential rather than insist on ones with prior experience. Focusing on a wide range of experiences, skills, and innate talents yields a much wider talent pool, putting more high-potential candidates within sight. In addition to related work experiences, key competencies, like problem-solving skills, provide reliable indicators of talent worth cultivating. This blog provides some tips to help you embrace this modern approach to recruiting.

Why the shortage of skilled technicians matters

A broader recruiting perspective is important to consider because the talent shortage in the field service industry shows no sign of diminishing. Forbes addresses this harsh reality of the broad talent shortage, saying, “Amid all the press about layoffs and AI replacing jobs, it’s natural to question whether there really is a talent shortage. The short answer is yes, the shortage of talent is real. It is global. It is significant, and it will be long-lasting.”

Manpower’s 2024 survey shows that jobs with technical skills are the hardest to fill, like information technology, engineering; operations and logistics; manufacturing and production, and maintenance and repairs.

A recent Field Service event offered this advice to attendees: “The field service talent crisis is going to continue to pose a significant challenge to the industry. To stand any chance of beating the crisis, the entire industry needs to rethink how it structures its technician roles and better communicate the opportunities of a field service career to young people.”

The Service Council reports that workforce engagement, retention, and workforce quality and skills are among the top concerns of leaders in field service organizations.

Trained skills vs. character attributes

Traditionally, recruiters have focused on a candidate’s education, training, and on-the-job experience when screening applicants and conducting interviews. That can produce a very limited set of candidates with few meeting the rigid qualifications. Positions can remain vacant for months waiting for the engineer with years of experience in field repairs to appear.

It’s time to reconsider how to qualify candidates. According to McKinsey, hiring for skills is over twice as effective in predicting job performance compared to hiring based on work experience. Many organizations are shifting to skills-based recruitment, rather than education-based. According to Hiring Lab, 52% of US job postings no longer mention formal education as a prerequisite.

Soft skills and innate character traits are proving to be more reliable indicators of a candidate’s ability to quickly grasp the necessary knowledge. A student mentality—meaning curiosity and a willingness to learn—is important as technology and the products requiring repair or maintenance continually change, often becoming more digitally advanced. With today’s high speed of innovation, new best practices continually emerge. A technician must keep up.    

So, tenacity, self-motivation, and problem-solving abilities are other key indicators of success in a field engineer role. Confidence when talking to customers, the ability to instill trust, a collaborative mindset, and a gift for explaining complex repairs in consumer vernacular are important, too.

How do you go about hiring workers with these characteristics?

Finding individuals with these competencies starts with the job description. Some organizations are avoiding listing the job vacancy under traditional job titles. Labeling the job as a repair technician, field engineer, or field service agent can conjure negative images in the mind of potential candidates. Stereotypes of a repairman with dirty overalls, grease on his hands, and an old pickup truck of rusty tools can immediately turn away prospects. Of course, these are hardly the images that apply to the role of field technician today.

Job candidates need to be educated about the high tech, advanced requirements of today’s field service engineer. You’ll need to paint a picture that stresses the professionalism expected, the technical components, and the luxury of not being tied to a desk or office, and not doing mundane administrative tasks. There are many benefits of working in field service, including the job fulfillment that comes from resolving a complicated service request.

Here are some phrases that will help cast the role in a favorable light and emphasize the skills you will find valuable:

• Would you like to be paid to solve new and unique problems every day, where you can enjoy autonomy and are encouraged to employ creative thinking to resolve mechanical and digital issues on-location?
• You’ll have state-of-the-art tools, access to data, and skills-based training to help you understand the customer’s investment and how you can help optimize the product’s performance.
• We provide the training. You provide a willingness to learn and a drive to please customers.

In addition to painting a positive picture of the role, you can also tailor your qualifying questions so that the prospect knows you are seeking candidates with certain competencies. These questions can be used in recruiting, during the interview phone screening, or the interview process.

• Are you a self-starter, motivated by hands-on work and the satisfaction of solving problems?
• Are you curious, willing to learn, always trying to find better ways of completing a task?
• Are you able to apply technologies to different situations and trouble-shoot possible solutions?
• Do you enjoy completing puzzles, resolving riddles, or playing games that test your logic skills?
• Can you talk to colleagues and customers with confidence, even if the topic is one that is complex?

Final take-away

Since the technician talent shortage isn’t going to end soon, you need to improve your recruiting tactics. By focusing on innate character traits and skills, rather than education or experience, you will be able to focus on the fundamental capabilities important to the role of field technician, expanding the pool of candidates and attracting more applicants. Ultimately, you’ll be able to find applicants with the essential competencies you need, such as a student mentality, tenacity, out-of-the box thinking and problem-solving skills. Start updating your recruiting efforts now. Rewrite your job descriptions and change how you go about qualifying candidates. Your creative thinking will pay off.

Discover how to overcome the technician shortage with field service software.