What does the perfect candidate for your role look like?

Finding candidates is a completely different ballgame compared to just 5 years ago.

According to a Talent Trends study by Linkedin, 73% of the employed workforce is open to exploring new opportunities and just 12% are actively looking. The other 15% are quite happy where they are.

This means that you need to think about things like where exactly you’re meant to find this 73%, how you approach them, and what perks to focus on.

I have said this before but recruitment today is like marketing and your candidates are your customers. Just like you would create a customer persona to help you tailor your marketing messages to your audience, you need to tailor your talent pipeline messaging to attract your ideal candidate.

By having a candidate persona you will be able to create more relevant job descriptions and job titles, know where to advertise, tailor your messages, and build your employer brand.

So how do you build your candidate persona?

  • Take a look at the HR data you have and find the trends and patterns like perhaps all your top performers had more than 3 years’ experience in a similar role. Whatever the trends and commonalities are, they will give you a good foundation to start your candidate persona.
  • You know who your current stars are. Use profiling or psychometric tests with your top talent. This will highlight some consistent behavioural preferences in your star employees that you should look for in your new candidates. If you use the right tool it can also support you with identifying cultural and team style matches.
  • Actually speak to your top performers as well and ask them what they like about the culture, what attracted them to your business, their favourite company benefit, their background experience and education, what their career aims are and so on. This will help you tailor the persona to your ideal candidate on a more personal level, appealing to their own goals and aspirations.
  • You can also ask your hiring managers where they acquired their top performers, how much experience they had, their top skills etc, to get the technical side ironed out.
  • Use the right tools to fill in the blanks. These include employee engagement surveys, psychometric tests, cloud based HR systems and so on. There are also many different models, frameworks and free templates out there that can help you to make a pretty educated guess at all the stuff you can’t find out. One such tool is the Customer Desire map.

The map works by mapping out your candidate’s  desires and fears. The point of it is to get inside your candidate’s heads so that you can identify the specific things they are looking for in a role and an organisation. You can then use this to tailor your messaging, your job descriptions and so on, giving you a better chance of attracting the right person for your business.

I have put together an example map and message which you can download and use as a template for your own use below!

customer desire map

Find out how we helped our client find their perfect candidate.

If you would like support for your recruitment project or want to find out more about using psychometric tests and employee surveys to find out more about your team, give us a call on 01256 328 428.