How do you go about finding a good HW guy for a side-project?

Asking because our analog layout guy with decades of experience really needs help with the discrete parts.

Nothing fancy just some rotary encoder work.

This is the kind of stuff I remember doing in my FPGA class a long time ago but I figure I'd be fumbling around in a real hardware land since I usually do embedded software.

There must be gotchas that an expert would know in a real hardware that are not present in a simulation.