HR teams and recruiters are under constant pressure to do their jobs faster, more efficiently, and more effectively than competitors. The challenge, of course, is that employers don’t just want quick hires, they want high quality quick hires.
This is no easy task, and recruiters are left to rely on a number of hiring strategies and technologies to help them on their hiring journeys.
One of these key strategies is talent profile examples, AKA candidate profiles. Below we’ll look at what talent profiles examples are and how they can improve the hiring process.
What is a candidate profile?
When most people think of talent profiles, they might imagine a profile coming from the employee side – something like a social media profile that has their basic information, skills, and experiences.
While profiles like this do exist in the recruiting world, talent profiles actually come from the employer’s side. These are employee blueprints or models that employers create in order to provide prospective candidates with a template for what their ideal candidate looks like.
Talent/candidate profile example
The below ContractRecruiter image is a great example of the kinds of things to include in your candidate profile. You can also distinguish between “necessary traits” and “desired traits” as well as specific experiences you want to see in your candidates.
How to develop a candidate profile
Let’s get into exactly how you can develop your own talent profile. From talent benchmarking to defining unique skill sets, the following list will help you customize candidate profiles to meet your unique hiring needs.
- Define job content
- Utilize a work activity analysis to come up with a comprehensive list of skills, responsibilities, and tasks that will help you define job content. An accurate and thorough job description will attract more quality hires who match up with your candidate profile.
- Understand your culture and vision
- Someone might be a great fit in terms of their skills and experiences, but they should also be passionate and committed to your corporate culture and vision. This requires you to define and clearly state your vision and long-term expectations in the candidate profile.
- Hard and soft skills matter
- Both hard skills and soft skills matter, and you should underscore the importance of both skill sets in your candidate profile. While hard skills often get more attention in candidate profiles and job descriptions, it’s important to remember that hard skills can be gained through practice and experience whereas soft skills often come down to personality factors and emotional intelligence, which are important in a team-oriented workplace.
- Emulate your top performers
- If you’re unsure what else to include in your candidate profile, look to your top performers. Look at their experiences, skill sets, training, degrees, and other experience-related factors, but also directly ask them about their experiences. How do they handle difficult challenges? Where do they find inspiration in their work? Assessing the work habits of your top performers will provide you with a real-life model to create your candidate profile.
- Know where to connect with candidates
- Try to identify which social media platforms, groups, career sites, and online communities your ideal candidate is a part of. From there, you can start sourcing quality candidates from the right places.
- Reference your candidate profile throughout the hiring process
- A candidate profile is only useful if you utilize it throughout the hiring process. Think of it like a cheat sheet that you can turn to when making a hiring decision. Does a candidate match well with the skill set and experiences outlined in your talent profile? Talent profiles can especially be useful when you’ve narrowed down two or three candidates for a specific role and need a tie-breaker.
While talent profiles aren’t all-in-one solutions to finding quality hires, they’re a valuable tool that HR teams and recruiters should be utilizing as a part of their holistic hiring strategies. The above tips will allow you to maximize use of talent profiles and start making top talent today.
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