Functional Safety Manager

Our clients included an industrial electronics company with around 2,000 employees at the time, which urgently needed several functional safety managers. For context: functional safety managers are usually engineers from hardware and software development. They make sure that the requirements of functional safety are observed and implemented when safety-critical systems are developed.

This is a highly complex task. It requires years of professional experience, an extremely careful and responsible way of working, and the ability to deal with people.

The client had tried in vain for a year to fill the positions before asking us for help. By then it had realised that the finished profile simply did not exist on the market. So it developed a training programme and was now looking for candidates who had what it took to be accepted into the programme and later take on the role of functional safety manager.

The first difficulty was describing this development path in a way that was both easy to understand and inspiring for the right candidates. To do so, I held a long, intensive briefing with the company’s head of development.

The next difficulty: we had to screen potential candidate profiles on LinkedIn and Xing, the German-speaking business network, assess their suitability and write to each candidate individually. Depending on what someone already brought to the table, their path looked completely different.

For this, the recruiter absolutely had to understand electronics development. Only then could the profiles be assessed properly and a constructive dialogue be held with the candidates.

In the end, we successfully filled several positions at different sites. The example shows two things: how important it is to adapt the requirements of a position so that real, available profiles exist for it – and to hire a search consultant who understands the technical details of the position.