The ideal candidate

Employees are the face of a brand, integral to service and product delivery, customer experience, and organisational culture. Therefore, uncovering what the ideal candidate is and the impact they'll have on your business is a crucial step before embarking on your sourcing strategy or making hiring decisions.

Identifying the ideal candidate should involve more than refreshing position descriptions. A vacancy is an opportunity to tidy up the expectations of the skills, experience, and personal qualities required to do the job.

The ideal candidate will be more than a candidate who ticks the skill and experience requirement boxes. Consideration of your business culture, values, and team, and aligning these to the expectations and skills required by the ideal candidate, is just as important.

We recommend starting with a list of the characteristics you'd hope to bring to your team and business with the ideal candidate:

• Do they need to work and collaborate with a team?
• Do they need to be creative and innovative?
• If you could introduce a new attribute to the team, what would it be?
• Is autonomy required?
• Is the work predictable or repetitive?

Then, consider the team, culture, and value requirements of your business, aligning these to the characteristics above:

• What is the leadership and management style?
• How does the management style impact the attributes of the ideal candidate?
• What does the businesses culture encourage? And how does this align with the candidate?

Given that employees are the face of a brand and business, impacting service and product delivery, and the customer experience, an open vacancy shouldn't be under-looked. Use open vacancies are an opportunity to identify ideal candidates and to influence sourcing strategies and hiring decisions. You may surprise yourself by the impact it can have on your employment brand!