In the world of sleuthing, police departments will sometimes call on a “profiler” to help them find out “who did it”. These profilers (who study the psyche of the criminal) are often met with skepticism which turns to amazement when they are proven to be accurate in their description of the culprit.

Understand the True Requirements of Your Job Posting

Are you willing to resort to this type of in-depth analysis of your ideal candidate when hiring? Candidate profiles flow from your job description - a clear and compelling description of your open position. By completing the candidate profile, you obtain a deeper understand the true requirements of the position and set yourself up for recruiting success. You need to be very clear about the type of person who will succeed in this position, in your company, in your industry and with your team.

Some great attributes of any candidate include:

• Technical skills, which are the skills of the profession (like a lawyer needs to know law!)
• Personality skills
• Management or working style
• Career fit
• Education

By completing the candidate profile in detail, you can develop an objective process for selection. One of the most challenging areas of the profile for many managers is to define the personality and working style fit.

Recently, there was a very active discussion on a LinkedIn group about what does it take to be an excellent CEO. Most of the responses dealt with the soft skills that can’t be written into a job description, but must definitely be included in the profile.

Key Characteristics of an Executive Profile

Some of the key characteristics in an executive profile that were highlighted are:

• authenticity with humility
• perseverance
• integrity
• adaptability
• strategic thinking
• the ability to create a trust culture
• consistency
• decisiveness
• passion
• intuition

As well, every organization has a life of its own. Businesses are dynamic with different challenges at different stages in their life-cycle. World events can have a huge impact as well as the maturity of the market, which calls for different approaches and different personality traits.

The Interview Questionnaire: Minimize Your Risk

Wikipedia provides 3 benefits to criminal profiling, with one being to give suggestions and strategies for the interviewing process. This is the key. An interview questionnaire designed to identify the critical competencies will minimize your risk. The accurate description of your ideal candidate directly ties into both the Telephone Interview Script and the In-Depth Interview Guide, providing a consistent, on-message hiring process.

As the police profilers know, the more you learn about your “suspect”, the less you rely on chance to hire the perfect employee.

Sample Job Descriptions - When making a hiring decision, everything stems from the job description - proof that you have actually thought out the job and what you’re looking for in terms of technical and personal fit.