What Would You Do?

Hopefully when you put together your shortlist of candidates to interview for your CNC Programming Job, you have at least 3 good candidates that all on paper have the skills you need to do the job in hand.

But that can sometimes bring it’s own set of problems.

I want you to imagine that you’re an owner of a small engineering company.

You normally sub contract out your CNC Machining but you’ve decided to take the plunge and buy your first machine tool.

After meeting the sales rep and deciding the most appropriate tool for the job you’ve invested over 50k on a 4 Axis Machining Centre.

As you’re a sub contractor to the Motorsport Industry it’s important that you respond quickly and accurately, to the regular requests for machining work, from the various companies that supply you digital drawings to produce programmes from.

One candidate is an experienced Programmer able to use CADCAM for not only design but also producing programmes using CAM (MasterCAM) and is more than capable of programming longhand in G code.

He has more experience than you need but experience you could really use in the future.

You have plans to design and manufacture your own product. This candidate has done this before and enjoys creating new products, he’s also devised methods of production, wrote the code, proved the programme, ran 1st offs, and set up the Production processes.

Long term he’ll be looking for a higher salary than the £24k that you were ideally looking to pay, and he’ll have to move closer to you to make the commute more reasonable (currently it’s less than an hour).

In the other corner you have a candidate capable of modifying and running the programmes, and closer to the salary you want to pay, he’s more local so the commute isn’t an issue.

He’s a good immediate solution because he can do the job for the money, but maybe he’ll never be able to offer more than that.

My question is, as an owner of a medium sized engineering company what would you do?

Would you go for the immediate solution? or would you pay a bit extra and take the opportunity to hire somebody with more skills than you need at the moment?

If you have a view, leave a comment, I’d be interested to know.