This is a very interesting topic, because there is a way to incent companies to hire engineers.
Many small and medium-sized companies are offering products and services that do not have a single engineer. Very often they are very innovative and entrepreneurially oriented. They have something unique, but they do not have an engineer on staff to maintain or help with their production. Getting that first engineer through the door is the critical path to hiring more engineers in industry. Once they see the value that an engineer brings to their company and their value-added proposition, then they create the pathway to hiring more, but the key is getting that first one into those SMEs.