Have you heard of a Candidate Avatar before? Do you know why you should use one in your recruitment process? At MKS HR we create a candidate avatar each and every time we fill a role for a client.
Think of this the same way that you think about your ideal customer profile This is the beauty of recruitment and why I love it so much! It is so closely related to marketing in varying ways-the candidate profile is one them.
When you started your business, you created your customer avatar, or the profile of your ideal customer that would want to buy your product or service. I hope you are nodding your head yes in agreement. I am going to make the assumption of yes you have one for your ideal customer(s).
So the candidate avatar is exactly the same thing. It is your ideal candidate that you want to apply to your job opening. They will have a specific set of skills and experience that fits the role you have. These skills will be the hard skills such as, specific number of years of related or exact work experience-i.e. they have a certain range of work experience doing the same job or something similar. Other hard skills are things like specific education (including level), certificates, or licenses, or designations.
Next is your soft skills, such as interpersonal skills, communications skills (oral & written), organizational skills, problem solving skills, and the list can go on and on. Some of you might be saying, “doesn’t that sound like my Job Ad or my Job description?” Yes you would be right because when you create a candidate avatar it can help create your job ad, or job description. Or for the reverse, if you create one of those first, it will then help you create the candidate avatar. Either way, one feeds into the other.
Where the candidate avatar differs than your Job Ad, or Job description is that you will add in things like what type of person are you looking for? For example, if you have an accounting or even bookkeeper role, then you want someone who is very processed oriented or who really likes structure. This is where the candidate avatar is really powerful because once you start to nail this down it allows you to think of places where to post your job.
For instance if your candidate avatar shows that you are looking for a niche skill set in terms of the required skills, knowledge and experience then maybe posting your role on LinkedIn could be a place where you will find candidates that match your avatar. Maybe the avatar shows that you are targeting graduating students from a specific program at a specific college or university!
Another area your candidate avatar helps is in creating the interview questions you will be asking the candidates. For example if you are looking for someone who process oriented you will ask a question around that. Then you will be able to assess if the candidates who have applied are ones that are process oriented, because not everyone is.
So now that you know a candidate avatar will help create interview questions to ask candidates, to determine where to post your role, and most importantly have an idea of the type of candidate that is needed to fill the role properly, do you think you might create one the next time you have a role to hire for?
As always MKS HR knows your time is so precious, we want have done some of the work for you! We have created a free Candidate Avatar template where you just fill in the blanks!
Still have questions or would like MKS HR to help you in putting this together? Click here to book a complimentary Discovery Call with MKS HR.
Click here to download your MKS HR Candidate Avatar template.