Red Flags When Hiring Controls Engineers
Buzzword fluency isn’t competence. The warning signs we screen for so you don’t discover them three months into a struggling automation project.
A controls engineer can make or break an automation project — and the cost of the wrong hire isn’t felt at the offer stage. It shows up three months in, on a struggling commissioning, with a line that won’t run right. Here are the warning signs we screen for.
Buzzword fluency with no depth underneath
The candidate uses all the right terms — ladder, function block, EtherNet/IP, SCADA — but can’t go one layer deeper when you probe. Ask how and why, not what. Real engineers get more specific under questioning; the fluent-but-shallow get vaguer.
Can’t describe past projects concretely
“I worked on the line controls” isn’t an answer. What was the architecture? What did you design versus inherit? What broke during commissioning and how did you fix it? Engineers who did the work remember the hard parts in detail. Vague ownership is a red flag.
No troubleshooting methodology
Ask how they approach a fault no one’s seen before. You want a process: reproduce, observe the data, isolate, hypothesize, test. Beware the answer that jumps straight to swapping hardware or “calling the vendor.” Strong controls people think before they touch.
Can’t read someone else’s code
Most real work is modifying logic written by someone who’s gone. An engineer who can only work in their own style, or who wants to rewrite everything from scratch, will be slow and risky in a brownfield plant. Ask how they approach undocumented logic they didn’t write.
Over-reliance on vendor support
Vendor support is a tool, not a crutch. If every hard problem in their stories ends with “so we opened a ticket,” you’re hiring a coordinator, not an engineer. You want someone who exhausts their own diagnosis first.
Job-hopping vs. project-based moves
Integrators and contractors move between projects — that’s normal and not a red flag. But a pattern of leaving direct roles every 12 months, especially right after commissioning, can signal someone who designs systems they don’t stay to support. Ask why each move happened.
Green flags, for contrast
- Gets more specific the deeper you probe.
- Owns past mistakes and explains what they learned.
- Has a repeatable troubleshooting method.
- Comfortable in others’ code and in legacy environments.
- Talks about uptime and the operators, not just the technology.
The EAS takeaway
You usually can’t spot these red flags from a résumé, and many hiring teams can’t spot them in an interview either — the vocabulary is convincing. We screen controls engineers technically, by people who’ve commissioned lines and chased the intermittent fault, so the problems surface before the offer, not after.
