You just found out you have a job opening. Now what? You have to place ads, collect resumes, sift through them, set up interviews, and make a hire. That's a lot of work - even for a large company where there are many different people in the HR office. And if you're a small company, you may be the only one doing all of that work. The simplest solution is to put an engineer recruiter to work for you.
An engineer recruiter, quite simply, is the person that's going to make short work of the hiring process. First, they are going to have a wide range of qualified individuals to pull from at a moment's notice. Do you need a temporary position filled before the end of the week? A recruiter is likely going to be able to make this happen.
Another reason why you want an engineer recruiter working for you is that they are going to save you time. There are likely a million and one things that you can be doing in your office besides sifting through resumes. When a recruiter is on the task of finding qualified individuals for the open position that you have, you can do other things and pause only to conduct final interviews to make the final determination as to which candidate will get the job.
Resumes can be extremely difficult to weed through. You need to look at education as well as experience. You want the "perfect" candidate and it's going to take a lot of work to be able to read between the lines on the resumes that you receive. While some will be obviously unqualified, others will require you to talk to the candidate. The only problem is that you can't set up preliminary interviews with 20 or more people for a single position. This is what you have an engineer recruiter for.
One of the best reasons why you want to work with a recruiter is that they don't work for your company. They don't go on the payroll and they aren't being paid by the hour. They are essentially a corporate head hunter. They get paid when they deliver the winning person to you. This means that you can save yourself a lot of time and money by hiring an engineer recruiter for your company because they will do a significant amount of work and you only have to pay one time - when they deliver.
Think about how long the process took the last time you had an open position. Did it take 2 weeks? 4 weeks? Longer? Is that person still working for you? If the answer is "no", then it might be time to think about the way you are doing your hiring. It may benefit you significantly to work with a recruiter. At least talk to one and find out what they can offer you and how much it will cost. You will likely find it's more cost effective to hire a recruiter than to do it yourself.