The humble role profile, a missed opportunity in Talent Acquisition

How many hours of verbal candidate briefing are carried out by recruiters, HR partners and hiring managers in a year of recruitment activity, and with what level of quality and consistency? 

If you value your candidate experience and are keen to close candidates on job offers, the answer should be a lot.

 

The role profile provides a great opportunity to qualitatively standardise and professionalise your candidate briefing process and drive efficiency and cost savings. The elements below can combine to make a high quality and powerful candidate briefing document:

 

• The organisation attractors – sector, size, market conditions, position in the market, products/services and financials etc.
• The Employee Value Proposition summary.
• Corporate culture.
• Function and department overview.
• Position description, purpose, accountabilities and deliverables.
• History – how has the position arisen, what expectation has the previous position holder created, what have been the successes and failures.
• Relationships – which categories of stakeholder will the position holder work with.
• Future. Where might the position holder move to.
• Required experience.
• Required competencies and behaviours.

Providing high quality information to candidates via a qualitative role profile embeds sales and marketing into the recruitment process from the outset and prompts both higher degrees of self-deselection and process commitment by candidates.

 

The perception of professionalism and higher degrees of engagement of both the hiring manager and the candidate is significantly enhanced by the quality of information and thoroughness of approach and generates goodwill, supporting the offer closing process.

 

Having a qualitative standardised template builds consistency of communication on key aspects of the value proposition across all internal stakeholders (and external partners) and enables a higher standard of candidate communications, supporting the employer brand. 

By removing, in the initial stages of the recruitment process, the need to spend so much time talking about what is now written in the role profile; an enormous amount of time is saved and can drive significant recruiter productivity improvements. This is particularly true for researched, passive, and social media candidates, who to a greater extent need to be sold before coming into the recruitment process. 

Building consistency across organisations is always a challenge, as is ensuring that hiring managers provide the time and that the facilitation is carried out by HR Partners and Recruiters. However, as recruitment channels are increasingly open, with many organisations having access to the same pool of talent, and as recruitment budgets put pressure on recruiter headcount, it is a challenge worth taking to deliver real benefits.