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44 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2020 Feature by Happy Holden I-CONNECT007 Editor's note: This article was originally published online in 2016 and has since been updated. Hopefully, your career has progressed to the point that you are empowered to recruit your own team or a key person for your team. There are always technical people looking for better jobs, but many times, the most talented are busy doing their work and not looking for new opportunities. If you are fortunate enough to work for a company that has established a stel- lar reputation, the job of recruiting becomes a lot easier. This was what I found after working a few years for Hewlett-Packard. Recruiting As a result of our rapid expansion and auto- mation due to the phenomenal sales of the HP-35 scientific calculator, I was promoted to process engineering manager. I needed to recruit more printed circuit process engineers. HP had a unique method of distributing engi- neering resources. It was a kind of free-market method for the workforce. Management would approve 10 times as many "internal hire only," as they would "authorized for external hire" and "relocation authorized." What this meant was that there was always a lot of competition for the most talented engi- neers in the company, as they could easily transfer to any of the open "internal hire only" jobs. If the recruiting manager pulled you into the new job, your current manager could not stop or oppose the transfer. This placed a lot of burdens on managers to properly coach, lead, and challenge their team. Any team manager who was dominating, lacked delegation skills, or always issued orders instead of letting engi- neers do their job was soon exposed because people transferred out, and no one wanted to transfer in. Without hiring from the outside (any good engineer would take any job just to get in), the lack of personnel became apparent. Printed circuit manufacturing was not one of the jobs that electrical engineers in HP wanted to do. EEs were also not the best choice for printed circuit manufacturing because chemi- cal engineers, chemists, and mechanical engi- neers had more skills useful to support the PCB manufacturing process. Therefore, I was