Writing the candidate specification
Now that you have reviewed the needs of the business and finalised the job specification, it’s time to think about the candidate. What you are about to put together is usually called the ‘candidate’ or ‘person specification’, ‘candidate profile’ or something similar.
The candidate specification identifies what skills and experience the candidates need to have and should match closely with what you have decided are the main elements of the job.
As with the job spec it is important to give this some logical thought, otherwise you may end up employing the person you liked best but who may not be the ideal candidate for the job.
Time spent at this stage – and it needn’t take long – will pay off in the end and this, together with the job spec, can also be used as part of your briefing for agencies or advertising. It doesn’t need to be detailed but it is useful to have something in writing, especially if others are going to be involved in the interviews – it will ensure that you are all looking for the same qualities. It may also be helpful to discuss it with your fellow interviewers before finalising it.
If other managers are going to be involved in the recruitment process, make sure they agree on the candidate specification before they start interviewing. You really don’t want them selecting different candidates for different reasons and then having a debate on what skills and experience are needed!
The candidate specification will help you assess the applicants’ details and the interviewees when you meet in person. Generally you can use four main sectors in order to consider the various aspects of their backgrounds and which are the most important elements. For each candidate you will then need to decide how important the sectors are.
- Education.
- Skills.
- Experience.
- Personality.
Skills and personality traits often merge, and some of us, for example, can be natural leaders and therefore think of this as a personality trait while others have learned how to lead and therefore it’s a skill. In this context skills should include fields that can be learned, and personality those that are inherent in our nature.
Hire people because you consider they can do the job and are the best matched candidate, and not because you liked them. Liking them will be an added advantage but it is not a reason to take someone on.
Education
The most easily assessed of these elements is education. Your company may have a policy on, for example, only hiring graduates into certain level jobs.
If there isn’t a policy, then consider what you really need. Before you decide on the level or the specific qualifications you are going to ask for, consider why you need them and whether they are really necessary.
- In some roles this will be obvious. You are not going to recruit a doctor without a medical degree but in non-specialist and non-vocational roles then it is less clear.
- If you think the candidates must have a degree, ask yourself why.
- If it’s because you want them to be able to show a good general education, the ability to focus on something for a period of time or other more general reasons, you may be excluding others who have the right experience but for some perfectly valid reason did not go to university.
- However, if you are recruiting for example someone to work in a science-based role you may need them to have a degree as this could be the only way you can validate their knowledge.
- You must be able to justify why you have specified educational qualifications to ensure that you are not being discriminatory in any way. For example, fewer older candidates will have a degree as not so many people went to university at the time they left school, and by insisting on a degree you could be excluding them. (See Chapter 16, Discrimination.)
- For the same reason don’t exclude older style or international qualifications, so for example make sure if you specify GCSE you include ‘or equivalent’ so that you are not prejudicing more mature candidates who have ‘O’ Levels.
- Qualifications are not the only measure of intelligence or competence. Is there another way to assess these skills?
You are recruiting for a role in which a major part involves signing off expenses, some of which can be complex. The successful candidate will therefore need to be numerate and have an eye for detail, but do they need to have a qualification such as ‘A’ Level maths? There are other ways of seeing if they can cope with this situation, so do not exclude good candidates by putting unnecessary requirements in your candidate specification. It may be more appropriate to include a practical task which will assess their ability. (See Chapter 4, Your Recruitment and Selection Process.)
When you analyse what you are looking for, in many jobs skills and experience will outweigh the educational needs unless there are specific qualifications for your company or type of work.
However, if you are recruiting junior roles or other roles which you know will attract a high response you may want to use the qualifications as a screening tool with which you can cut numbers down but you will have to ensure that these are justified.
- Do make sure that you are aware of other qualification equivalents, especially older style and international ones.
- Do make sure that the qualification you are demanding is needed to do the job.
- Do try and think of another way of assessing skills.
- Do not include a requirement that is not necessary and therefore potentially discriminatory.
Skills
Many interviewers assess candidates on their experience alone, but it is usually the skills they can bring to you which are most important. Try to identify the skills you need first and then decide what experience will demonstrate these.
Experience in one company doing what sounds a similar job does not automatically mean that the candidate has the correct skills for your role. Job titles often mean different things in different organisations and the emphasis of the role and the way it is managed may bear no relationship to the one you are trying to fill. Try to think what skills you need for your position and then relate that to the types of jobs the candidate could have done.
You are recruiting a customer service clerk to deal with your wholesale clients. Most of the work is on the telephone and you need someone who is proactive and can sell additional product to these customers.
You decide to put as essential ‘experience in a customer service role’. One of the candidates has this but they have been dealing directly with consumers and mainly by letter and email. Although their experience looks a good match, this candidate does not have or cannot demonstrate from their experience that they have the verbal communication or sales skills.
In this profile you need to ask for the candidate to be able to demonstrate verbal communication and sales skills. It is the skills which are important.
If you have a plethora of candidates who fit the bill more closely then you should reject this one. However, if you are short of interesting candidates then you may want to interview them but you need to make sure that you establish if they have these verbal communication skills.
Ask yourself the following question:
What skills does the candidate need to have?
By going through your job specification and thinking about the situations the job holder will have to deal with, you can identify the skills they will need.
These could be:
- Organisational – their ability to manage their workload, organise projects or events, etc.
- Communication – this may include spoken, written, telephone at all levels but may need specialist skills, for example in a marketing team.
- Management – how they manage their team.
- Decision-making ability.
- Financial – numeracy skills.
- Sales – retail or wholesale – ability to sell new products, increase sales to existing accounts.
- Technical – are their skills in a specific area what you need? – operating machinery through to diagnosing highly specialised mechanical problems.
- Influencing – can they get things done even by those that may not work directly for them?
- Leadership – can they take the lead in different situations and persuade others to follow?
- Team work – ability to work in a team.
- Planning – are they able to plan ahead, work to schedules, etc.?
Try to establish what skills you need for the role you are recruiting and from that decide what experience, how much and in what type of environments you are likely to find candidates who can demonstrate these. Again, if you think you are going to be inundated with responses then you can make these more demanding in order to use them as a selection tool.
The term ‘selection tool’ can be applied to anything you use to enable you to compare candidates for short listing and then for interviewing and ultimately hiring.
Experience
The next stage is to decide what type of experience the applicants will need to have, to be able to demonstrate to you that they do have these skills.
Do they need to have gained the relevant experience in a similar company or department?
For example, if you are searching for someone with good administration skills to work in your sales department, does their experience have to be within a similar function or could they have worked in any type of administration?
Is there a reason to specify that they MUST have gained their admin experience within a sales department?
They may be customer-facing from day one and therefore this IS essential.
When considering more senior roles you want to hire someone with proven managerial experience.
Does this have to be in the same field or could they have managed a team in a totally different type of company?
Management skills are transferable: they may not need to work in the same sector.
How big a team must they have managed to be able to demonstrate they can manage yours?
Management skills are the same no matter what size the team is, so providing they can demonstrate management skills perhaps they could have managed a different sized team.
How much experience should / can I ask for?
Once you have ironed out where their experience needs to come from, think about how much experience they will need. Try to quantify this in terms of what they will need to have done to prove they have the skills for your role. Give this careful thought, as specifying a length of experience is no longer considered good practice. You have to be able to justify why you need it, and if you can’t then it can be seen as ageist and prejudiced against people who are too young to have been in the workplace for the length of time you are demanding.
Try to think of it in terms of what they will need to have done to prove they have the skills that are an essential requirement of your vacancy.
In an executive role which involves setting and overseeing budgets, you may want the successful applicant to have seen through several financial years which will also include years where they have set, monitored and re-evaluated their own budgets. To do this they will have been in a similar role for at least three years, as the first year they will have inherited the budgets, second year will be theirs but it is not until the third year that they will be able to review their own budgets.
Use this as your criterion rather than specifying five years’ experience.
If you have considered but dismissed promoting internally, you must have identified a skill missing in your internal candidates. Don’t forget to include this in your candidate specification.
When recruiting a general manager you may have already dismissed the idea of promoting any of your junior managers because they do not have strong enough presentation skills. Ensure that this need is covered when you put together the candidate specification. It will also help ensure that these junior managers feel they have been treated fairly.
Many of the skills you have identified that your applicants need to have will be covered in one set of experience. A sales manager should be able to demonstrate their sales ability, managerial expertise, communication skill, budgeting know-how, etc. over a period of time, but this can be in just one job.
Personality
Personality can be a very sensitive topic but it may also be an important factor to enable the candidate to deal with different situations. You don’t want an extrovert in an analysis role or an introvert in a media role. However, it can be very difficult to quantify for the purposes of the specification and can be very subjective, i.e. what one person considers a confident personality another can see as being difficult.
Try and think of the situations the successful candidate will have to deal with and then decide what type of personality they will need to succeed in them.
- What kind of person will fit well in the team – lively, studious?
- They deal with your customers – outgoing?
- The problems they will deal with are very complex – tenacity?
- The problems are very detailed – eye for detail?
- The solution is not always obvious – analytical?
- The information they deal with is highly sensitive – confidentiality?
- They will have access to cash – honesty?
- There is not always a set process for dealing with problems – initiative?
Importance of each element
As you consider each element, also think about how important each one may be and cross-refer this with the job specification. You can quantify each category by calculating whether each element is ‘essential’, ‘desirable’ or ‘useful’. This will help you to evaluate candidates both from their curriculum vitae and during the interview.
- Firstly decide on what is ‘essential’ for the role. This will be education level, skills or experience that the candidate must have to enable them to complete the job. It will include areas that you are not willing or able to train in and it will usually relate to the points in the specification that are the most important parts of the job. If you are to proceed with a candidate they MUST have these essential elements.
- Other candidate features may not be essential but they will be desirable. You would not dismiss a candidate from consideration simply for not having these, but they will help you compare and select candidates. They do not have to have these qualities to be able to do the job, but they will assist the candidate greatly.
- Thirdly are those elements that are useful. These are parts of the candidate’s make-up that will simply give them added value, and again can be used to select between candidates.
Your company works in the Spanish market so you are thinking of hiring a Spanish speaker, but is this an ‘essential’, ‘desirable’ or ‘useful’ skill?
If your company works exclusively with Spanish companies where your contacts do not speak English, or the role will cover this specific market, added to which cold-calling new prospects is involved, then speaking and writing Spanish fluently is ESSENTIAL.
If your company works with Spanish customers most of whom speak some English, then speaking Spanish is DESIRABLE, although this could be conversational rather than fluent.
If your company’s Spanish contacts all speak English but it would help to build the relationships if someone can have a brief conversation with them in their native tongue, then Spanish will be USEFUL.
Although the aim is to find a candidate with all of the essential, desirable and useful skills and experience it is not always possible. Compromise on the useful elements first, as these are ‘add-ons’, then the desirable ones, but try not to compromise at all on the essential. If you compromise on the essential it will leave you with a training need that you had not allowed for or a candidate who is going to take much longer than anticipated to grow into the role.
Before finalising the candidate specification you may want to ‘adjust’ it according to the level of difficulty there may be in finding suitable candidates.
How difficult is it going to be to fill this role?
The candidate profile should reflect this by being more flexible and less demanding if it’s a difficult role likely to have only a few responses. You may be able to do this by keeping an open mind on where they gained their experience; it could be in any type of company, not just one in the same area as yours.
If it’s an easy role to fill with lots of potential candidates, by making the criteria tougher you can immediately reject some of them but don’t make the criteria so tough that you end up recruiting someone who is over-qualified and therefore expecting more from the job.
Make sure you pitch your candidate specification at the right level. Do not make it so demanding that no candidate can possibly reach the criteria or alternatively so open that anyone could apply.
Finally, ensure that all of your criteria are necessary for the job and that you have not included anything that could be discriminatory. For example, insisting on written fluency in English when there is no written work in the job may help you screen candidates but it could be seen as discriminatory.
- Do not use terminology the candidates will not know or understand because it is company jargon.
- Do be realistic about the person you are seeking: don’t ask for so much that you will never find a candidate.
- Concentrate on skills rather than experience.
- Decide on the essential aspects that you cannot compromise on and others in the desirable and useful categories that you can.
- Include the candidate profile with the job specification and give it to candidates to help them understand your requirements.
- Ensure you have not included any criteria which could be prejudicial to certain groups.