Employee profiling: The guide to efficient hiring

During talent acquisition, hiring managers scan resumes to identify skilled and qualified candidates that don’t always convert into high-performing employees. However, it is also possible to find naturally talented and skilled professionals without relevant education and certifications. These individuals empower the team and improve business outcomes.

Hiring managers utilize domain tests to gauge candidates’ technical fitment, but these tests only identify the domain or coding expertise of professionals, not interpersonal skills like team performance, assertiveness or even potential to succeed. Employee profiling, on the other hand, highlights candidates’ on-the-job skills, thinking capabilities, and challenge-handling skills. It allows knowing professionals’ talents beyond education, certifications, and industry experience.

Employee profiling collects relevant details related to candidates, such as problem-solving skills, working capabilities, and emotional intelligence. These factors influence a typical workday of employees, and identifying these skills and personal preferences helps select the best-fit candidates.

Creating employee profiles helps hiring managers consider the entire personality of an individual rather than only focusing on their work experience and education. Hence, it becomes easier to figure out the potential and success of a candidate in the new role.

Every employee is essential for organizational success. Therefore, hiring managers must find and retain relevant professionals for every job role. Employee profiling meets this goal by helping hiring managers select suitable candidates based not only on their education and experience but also their personality, behavior, and aptitude.

Since businesses today need people with unique transferable skills, employee profiling ensures that team members and colleagues complement each other’s efforts and skills.

This method also helps better understand existing employees and analyze what motivates them.

Employee profiling tools help understand candidates’ preferences, personalities, behavior, and maximum potential. Therefore, this method is widely used in the industry for candidate screening, internal mobility, and lead generation.

Hiring managers can create candidate personality profiles to highlight competencies imperative for a job role. These profiles gauge applicants’ on-the-job performance, interpersonal skills, and cognitive intelligence. As a result, the focus is shifted from subjective interviews to concrete competencies required for specific roles.

With an ideal job description and employee profile, finding the right people during campus drives becomes easier. When hiring managers know the skills they are looking for and have relevant tools to gather information, it is simpler to make data-based hiring decisions.

Creating profiles for internal job roles helps move employees to relevant positions. This offers valuable insights into the potential of every employee, encouraging correct lateral and vertical movement within the company.

During recruitment drives, gaining detailed information about candidates helps make accurate decisions. However, a comprehensive employee personality profile requires effort and time. Here are a few steps to make employee profiles:

Step 1: Understand business values and mission

Before creating employee profiles for different job roles, businesses need to understand their core values and mission. Identifying business motivators, long-term goals, and basic cultural needs is imperative.

For example, if a business values creativity and innovation and utilizes it to progress in the industry, then it should hire people who enjoy working on new ideas. These people should be enthusiastic about innovating and making valuable changes in existing processes.

Step 2: Identify current employee needs

After identifying the business mission and values, shortlist understaffed departments and teams that need quality employees. Evaluate open positions and explore why these job roles are difficult to fill. This will highlight challenges faced during the hiring and help analyze the following factors:

• Can these job roles be outsourced?
• Can the company hire a contractor for this work?
• Can a freelancer fulfill this seasonal demand?

Exploring a company’s job role requirements helps decide the type of employees needed for a specific employee profile.

Step 3: Create a clear job description

Job descriptions outline the skills and educational needs of a job role. Every company should prepare unique job descriptions based on their business needs. This helps include traits essential in employees, such as good communication, transferable skills, interpersonal skills, cognitive intelligence, etc.

Hiring managers should focus on the description’s language, formation, and information delivery. It should reflect the ideal employee profile and eliminate complexities.

Step 4: Assess skill sets for the role

One critical employee profiling aspect is assessing the skills needed for every position. Every position requires specific knowledge, expertise, and years of experience.

For example, when hiring a sales manager, the requirement is that of professionals with ten years of sales experience, strong communication skills, and negotiation power. This can also include skills like strong work ethics, learning eagerness, etc.

Step 5: Utilize pre-employment tests

Once the job description has been created and posted, applicants will begin reaching out. At this stage, sending pre-employment assessments helps shortlist candidates according to the chosen criteria.

Mercer | Mettl’s pre-employment tests gauge candidates’ coding skills, cognitive intelligence, personality traits, behavioral tendencies, communication skills, and domain-specific knowledge. These tests offer concrete insights into candidates’ on-the-job performance and skills.

Step 6: Interview the suitable candidates

After conducting pre-employment tests, only interview the candidates that are suitable for the role. Candidates who have passed these tests should be moved to the next stage of interviews, which includes:

• A phone interview to understand the candidate better.
• An HR round to negotiate the candidate’s requirements.

Employee profiling tools simplify the process by accurately gauging important competencies and skills in candidates. Here are a few employee profiling tools that hiring managers can utilize:

1. Personality assessments

Personality assessments help understand candidates’ behavioral and personality traits. One of the common methods is to ask personality-based questions that require applicants to rate their traits.

Mercer | Mettl Personality Profiler helps hiring managers identify the personality of individuals required for critical work. It intelligently links behavioral data to organizational outcomes, offering access to hidden details about candidates.

This model helps objectively evaluate candidates’ personalities for employee profiling.

2. Psychometric assessments

Psychometric assessments are another category of tests that evaluate the personality, intelligence, aptitude, and behavioral style of candidates. They help understand whether candidates are team players, good communicators, and emotionally stable professionals. Therefore, these tests are widely used to match candidates’ abilities to relevant job roles or employee profiles.

Mercer | Mettl’s Psychometric Tests are used to make hiring decisions objectively. It reveals candidates’ positive personality traits, dark personality traits, motivation, preferences, values, and cognitive ability. This information helps hiring managers improve hire quality by 2X and reduces attrition by 30%.

3. Social media employee profiling

Hiring managers can gain additional information about candidates via their social media profiles, such as LinkedIn. How do they respond? How do they interact? How do they express their views publicly? How many people have endorsed them?

These details help HR understand the collaborative nature and emotional intelligence of candidates. Therefore, social media is a valuable tool for collecting relevant candidate details.

• Creating employee profiles is a valuable method for hiring the best-fit employees. However, many other factors, such as salary, industry experience, etc., sometimes need to be considered.
• Hiring managers may use one employee profile as a benchmark for all departments and positions. However, personalized employee profiles should be created for different departments and positions.

Employee profiling is essential for businesses to collect core information and hire based on important candidate skills. This is a strategic resource for hiring managers to find culturally, technically, and emotionally fit candidates. Hence, improving workplace productivity and process efficiency.