Knowing your Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP)

What is a Candidate Profile?

A Candidate Profile is a representation of what your ideal candidate looks like. We call this your ICP. This is not skills, experience, or a list of competencies that HR typically looks for in a candidate. Those attributes are important, but they are not the keys to identifying your ICP. A Candidate Profile is the characteristics of your ideal candidate that will make them a perfect fit for your team. This will help to guide you to making the perfect hire.

Why is an Ideal Candidate Profile so important?

Having strong ICP will help you:

Create better job advertisements and convert better quality applicants
Guide you to best channels to advertise your roles
Streamline your sourcing strategies and reduce your recruitment costs
Increase your employer branding
Lower turn over rates
And so much more…

A well-crafted Candidate Profile puts you in the shoes of the candidate. It is a crucial first step in understanding the candidate journey and creating a much better candidate experience. It will help you to understand what the perfect candidate is looking for in their job search, where to find them, and how to better engage them.

Steps to creating an Ideal Candidate Profile

Although the process of creating a strong ICP can be time-consuming, it is a valuable exercise, and the ROI will prove to be extremely high. We recommend having an ICP for every role within your organization. However, a great place to start is by creating profiles for each category i.e., sales profile, operations profile, warehousing profile etc.

When it comes to creating a profile, we have identified three key steps:

Step 1: Research

The best way to start the process of building your ICP is to throw everything you currently know about your roles out the window. A true candidate profile needs to be built on real data, not gut feeling. That is why we recommend starting with research.

i) Employees:

The perfect place to start with building your data is by talking to your existing employees. Begin with the actual department but be sure to talk to other departments to see what they feel are key factors to success in the roles they interact with on a daily basis. Here are a few data points to prioritize:

Interests: What part of the role do you enjoy doing the most?
Motivations: Why did you apply to this company?
Attributes: Characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, interests, and fears.
Skills: What skills, certifications, coursework, etc. help you to succeed?
Goals: What kind of career do they want to build? Where do they want to be in five years?
Objections: What would cause a candidate to not want to work for a company? What aspects of a company’s brand, culture or hiring process would cause them to lose interest?
Web activity: Where do they spend time on the internet? Identify which online platforms they utilize for leisure, for networking and of course, where they look for jobs.

ii) Stakeholders:

It is essential during this process to ensure that key stakeholders are on board or you could run into potential roadblocks down the line. Take the time to talk to key players like hiring managers, recruiters, and sources to see what they typically look for in a new hire. Get a feel for the way the team currently looks for new candidates. What are some of the best hires they have made and why are they so different? This important intel will give you a strong glimpse into where candidates can be found and what to look for.

Step 2: Trends

Once you have gathered all your data, the next step is to analyze the data and look for trends. This is where your profile really starts to take shape.

The goal is to develop a list of qualities and characteristics that make up the ideal candidate for each of the positions you’re trying to fill. If you are struggling to do this effectively, consider asking yourself the following questions:

Interests: What part of the role do you enjoy doing the most?
Motivations: Why did you apply to this company?
Attributes: Characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, interests, and fears.
Skills: What skills, certifications, coursework, etc., help you to succeed?
Goals: What kind of career do they want to build? Where do they want to be in five years?
Objections: What would cause a candidate not to want to work for our company? What aspects of a company’s brand, culture or hiring process would cause them to lose interest?
Web activity: Where do they spend time on the internet? Identify which online platforms they utilize for leisure, for networking and, of course, where they look for jobs.