You’ve found the perfect candidate for the job, and now it’s time to make it official with a written job offer. While a written letter is vital for this industry, there are several things that you’ll want to avoid putting in your engineering job offer letter in order to protect your company and make sure your best interests are being served. In today’s litigious society, you simply cannot be too careful.

Let’s look at a few things that should never go into a job offer letter.

1. Putting At-Will at Risk. You are hiring employees on an at-will basis and this needs to be abundantly clear in your letter. State that they are indeed “at-will” and avoid language that specifies certain lengths of employment, “yearly” salary or any terminology that could put their “at-will” status in jeopardy.

2. Overly vague language. You must be clear in your job offer letter. Vagaries are what get companies in trouble. You must be completely specific about your expectations and what the employee must do to remain employed by your company.

3. Failing to specify conditions of employment appropriately. Your job offer letter should never detail job duties, this is should be referenced that a complete job description will be provided to the employee upon their actual acceptance of the offer. Instead, you must detail what your conditions of employment are, and these must be clear statements. If an employee will void their at-will status with your firm by doing something, this must be included here.

4.  Actual salary or compensation figures. Another thing to avoid your job offer letter is the actual amount of their proposed compensation. This should be avoided because it can jeopardize their at-will status (see the above “yearly” salary) and it can create expectations that your company must fulfill. You can reference compensation just like you would the job description, that they will be furnished with a salary or compensation package upon their acceptance of the offer.

5. Security statements.  Avoid any statements that imply job security, such as the ability to advance within your organization, actual set terms of employment, etc… The bottom line is, they may seem like the right candidate now, but in three months, they may be your worst nightmare. Never put anything in their offer letter that could be construed as offering them a set term of employment or security within their position.

Social media has gained quite a foothold in the employment sector, and if you’re not yet using this medium to search for new hires, you could be missing out on some of today’s top talent. One of the best places to find candidates for engineering positions is LinkedIn.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is geared more towards professionals and is designed for networking and more recently, has upped its offerings for both job seekers and employers to help bring them together.

If your company doesn’t already have a LinkedIn profile, that is the first step to complete. It should be fully fleshed out and contain the names of your principals, information about your company and your achievements, and lastly, the available positions within your organization.

Once you’ve got that set-up, the next step is to include a posting in LinkedIn’s job board. This posting can stand alone, or link to your profile page for more information. Consider broadening the locality of your job posting to increase interest among candidates.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, the next step is to begin using the service to network with other companies and job seekers. You can also become involved in the message boards that are available through this service.

Get your name out there and candidates will want to learn more about your company and the positions you are currently hiring for. While this process does require a little extra effort, it will not only help create interest in your job openings, but it will help increase interest overall in your company and broaden your current social networking efforts.

One thing to remember with LinkedIn is that etiquette truly does matter. If you take part in the discussions on the boards there, try to provide useful and helpful information and become a part of the community. Those who are simply there for the benefits are generally looked down upon. It’s better to become as active as you can and reap the benefits that come from that.

A team of researchers at IBM announced a groundbreaking new development in microchips. Dubbed the “optochip,” this new creation can transfer 1 terabit of information in one second. To put this into perspective, that’s the equivalent of 500 high definition movies being transferred in just 60 seconds.

This is a huge development in information technology and has the power to completely revolutionize the industry. Social networking sites, video sharing sites and other services that rely on being able to transfer massive amounts of data in a small period of time can all benefit from this new creation.

Unlike previous types of chips that rely on traditional means of transferring data, the Optochip uses optical transmission. The future of this type of technology is very bright and it is conceivable that within the next few years, the Optochip could be improved to be even faster, as difficult as that may be to believe right now.

“Reaching the one trillion bit per second mark with the Holey Optochip marks IBM’s latest milestone to develop chip-scale transceivers that can handle the volume of traffic in the era of big data,” commented Clint Schow, an IBM researcher involved in the creation of the prototype. “We have been actively pursuing higher levels of integration, power efficiency and performance for all the optical components through packaging and circuit innovations. We aim to improve on the technology for commercialization in the next decade with the collaboration of manufacturing partners.”

The team plans to present their findings and discuss more about their prototype during the Optical Fiber Communication Conference held in Los Angeles.

Thanks to a collaboration between the University of Southampton and the University of Cambridge, exciting new developments have emerged in the study of how heat effects materials. With equipment on loan from Mettler-Toledo, the research team was able to observe exactly what happens when semiconductors are heated very rapidly, as much as 10,000 degrees C a second.

The research found that materials such as crystal react quite differently from glass or silicon and they admitted that the behavior they found with rapid heating was not at all what they expected.

According to Professor Dan Hewak from the University of Southampton, “We have been studying novel glasses and phase change materials for two decades here at the Optoelectronics Research Centre. However, our understanding of what happens when these materials are heated, that is, their crystallization and melting behaviours, has been limited to heating rates of about 10 degrees C per minute using conventional thermal analysis. In reality, in the memory devices we fabricate, heating rates are millions of times faster and it is reasonable to expect that in order to improve these devices, an understanding of their properties at the same heating rates they will be used is needed.”

What does this mean for the rest of us? These studies will impact the way that memory devices are created. By understanding how heat effects different materials, researchers are well on their way to creating faster and more power memory capabilities for smart phones, tablets, and other small electronics. Not only will this understanding impact the speed of these devices, but also how much power they consume, leading perhaps to smart phones that will no longer suck down battery lives at high speeds.

Previous experiments in this field revealed much, but it was not until the team was able to heat these materials at such incredibly high speeds, with just a difference in degrees at each stage, that they were able to unlock the mystery of how these different materials are affected.