The team at A.C.Coy finds that creating a candidate profile is a more efficient way to find the perfect match for our clients. It’s a cost-effective way to improve the quality of the job candidate while ultimately reducing the time to hire.
A candidate profile is a blueprint for finding the ideal candidate for a specific job. It can include hard job skills as well as soft skills and even human characteristics like “independent thinker,” “confident,” or “collaborative.” A candidate profile can answer questions such as, “Where does the candidate work now?” or “How many years of experience do they have?”
Look for hard skills, which are the teachable abilities like credentials or on-the-job experience that the candidate has. Soft skills are personal characteristics to help them acclimate well into the business culture. This could be tenacity, communication skills, and work ethic—or something else.
Since the best candidates are already working, particularly in the most in-demand fields such as technology, you’ll want to target the best people well before they’re even ready to start their search. A candidate profile helps you track down the right kinds of candidates to fit in the role.
You can divide the candidate profile into must have/nice to have characteristics. Start with the job duties to define the bare-bones outline of your perfect candidate. Then look at the company culture and mission. What are the personality characteristics that fit well within that organization? What personality traits does the company value in their employees. Ask yourself these questions:
- Based on the culture, what personality traits should your candidate have?
- Who are the top performers in the company, and what characteristics do they embody?
- What type of person could fulfill the job duties?
- What kind of candidate could complement company values and be a good organizational fit?
- What are the goals for the job and what characteristics or experience will the candidate need to achieve them?
If you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager, you can pose these questions to current employees to help you begin to build an emerging profile of what you’re looking for. Once you’ve created the profile you can use keywords and search your database, LinkedIn, job boards, or even the rosters of MeetUps, which are popular with developers, for example, to find the right kinds of people. This process brings your candidate profile to life as you begin proactively reaching out to potential candidates in these venues.
A candidate profile can help you cut your time to hire by avoiding taking time to speak to anyone that doesn’t fit your profile. This could help you write a better job ad. Overall, it improves your sourcing strategies by working smarter on the top targets you know would be a good fit.
A.C.Coy uses the candidate profile methodology to cut our clients’ costs. It makes for a much more efficient recruiting process that creates relationships with passive job candidates while cutting the time to hire. Let us show you how this process could change your hiring process for the better. Contact us.
