Hints/tips when hiring a recent graduate?

What a good question!

Absolutely I'd agree using IEng (and CEng) competency frameworks is an excellent idea. It's nowhere near appreciated enough in my experience that a very large part of the value of the registration standards is in giving a good benchmark for the soft skills side of being a valuable well rounded professional engineer (irrespective of whether they actually apply for registration). 

Another critical aspect is finding out what they really want from their career, not necessarily the same as what they said at interview in order to get the job! And in fact they may not really quite know at that stage. The joy of small companies is that there are so many more opportunities to try different things, including those completely unrelated to engineering. The first step is identifying whether they do just want to do what they were employed to do (which some engineers do, and get very stressed otherwise). If so then it's having a plan that lets them stick to that (maybe with a gently upward nudge now and then). On the other hand, if they do want to explore other opportunities it's coming up with a plan which allows them some elbow room, to try different things out while still getting the job done that you employed them for in the first place. 

It's using their own momentum to your benefit. Long and bitter experience has taught me that deciding there is a career path that people “should” follow in your organisation never works. But working out how the path they want to follow can benefit your organisation works really well - they'll do half the work for you. Provided of course you don't recruit people who are carbon copies of each other (or, even worse, carbon copies of you - which many managers do). Even with recruiting two people you can look for a mix of personality styles that's going to suit the organisation in different ways in the longer term.

I'll see if any other thoughts come to me…

Cheers,

Andy

…another thought did come!

What do your clients (internal or external) think your team's competences should be? Are you able to meet these at the moment? If so then do the new starters meet these immediately, or do they need a development plan to get there? If your team does not have the right competences at the moment (and be really honest about this), is this an opportunity to develop those skills in your team by developing them in your new starters?

Just a note of caution here, the new starters will probably be expecting you to mentor them, which is really hard if you're trying to get them to fill a gap by developing skills you don't have. Even if you can't mentor them in the skill itself, make sure that you are supporting them in the process of obtaining it. Be prepared to be a sounding board for ideas, help them select worthwhile training opportunities, try to find them projects where they can did their toe into the new skill at relatively low risk.

Cheers,

Andy