Hiring the right people is a priority for every business. To keep your competitive edge, you’ll need to find high-performing employees who not only have the right skills but will also help grow your business.

How do you determine the skills and experience you need for a given role, and then find the candidates to match? At Mindfield, we use Qualified Candidate Profiles (QCPs) to help our clients define their recruiting needs and end up with best-fit applicants.

What does a qualified candidate look like?

The first question for any hiring manager should be “what does a qualified candidate in this role look like?” This should be more than just a tick box exercise. At Mindfield, we spend the time with our clients to find out precisely what they need and who they’re looking for. This is a crucial step to make sure the candidates we source and present align with our clients’ needs.

Without a QCP, you might waste time recruiting not-so-great fits, resulting in higher turnover or sub-par performance. Define your ideal candidate now, and avoid mistakes later.

Are you looking for purple unicorns?

One aspect of defining your needs is to start separating out the “must-haves” from the “nice-to-haves.”

Too often, hiring managers have unrealistic expectations, asking for multiple years of experience in entry-level roles, or listing many soft skills that are unrelated to the actual position.

For example, in a Career Advisory Board Survey, hiring managers were asked to rank the most important skills for entry-level candidates. Of these skills, the ten most important weren’t very commonly found amid the actual candidate pool. Analysis of an earlier version of the same survey suggested that hiring managers and recruiters were missing out on qualified candidates because they were setting unrealistically high expectations.

In short, hiring managers were looking for purple unicorns: perfect candidates who only exist in dreams. Sure, it would be great to find a candidate who perfectly matches every possible requirement you have, but this ideal unicorn doesn’t exist in the real world. Worse, if you include unrealistically high qualifications in your job ad, you could risk alienating the candidates who might actually be well-suited to your company.

When we work with clients to define a QCP, we help them define the core functionalities of the role. We also separate out what the candidate must already know how to do, versus what the company can train new hires to do.

What are the key components in a QCP?

So, what goes into a QCP? At Mindfield, we consider a range of components when building a candidate profile for our clients. These include:

  • Required job qualifications
  • Wage range and shift types
  • Company benefits

Your QCP will vary depending on your business, the types of role you’re hiring for, and your company’s values and priorities.

Mindfield helps companies through the full recruitment lifecycle, from building a strong QCP, through the screening and interviewing process, right up to hiring super-qualified, best-fit candidates. To learn how we can help your business recruit better, explore our solutions today.

 

About Mindfield

Mindfield is a Recruitment Outsourcing solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine a recruitment team, simple to use technology and a data-driven hiring strategy that promises to improve the quality of your hourly workforce. This approach focuses on tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure, and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates.