What do you do when the dream candidate doesn’t show up?
It’s always a good idea to create a job profile, even if no candidates match it. A Matchscore can quickly and easily reveal that none of the candidates match the initial requirements and allow you to ensure a successful recruitment. Here’s our best advice.
In our last newsletter, we announced that the new Matchscore tool was on its way. The Matchscore is a number generated when a job profile for a specific position is compared with the candidates test result
The Matchscore ranges from 0-100, where 0 is the worst possible match between the job profile and the test result, while 100 represents a perfect match between the job profile and the test result. The Matchscore thus provides an insight into how well a candidate’s profile matches the desired attributes or parameters set out in advance in the job profile.
The assessment is data-driven and ensures a consistent and objective assessment of all candidates, free from the bias that can occur when your assessment is influenced by, e.g., a candidate’s first impression, clothing, appearance, gender, personality traits you recognise in yourself, or other more or less unimportant impressions that have no bearing on how well the candidate will perform in the job.
Of course, ideally a candidate will appear who possess all the ‘right’ competences and a profile that matches the job profile perfectly! It’s just rarely realistic that you’ll get exactly what you’re looking for. The Matchscore tool can therefore also indicate that none of the candidates matches the company’s initial wishes, which opens up some important considerations – because what should you do when the dream candidate doesn’t turn up?
Why it’s a good idea to create a job profile, even if it doesn’t match the candidates.
According to a new study by Statistics Denmark, skilled employees are hard to find, and unemployment has hit its lowest level since 2009. This means that when companies are in the market for a new employee, dream candidates are not an abundant resource.
It’s nevertheless a good idea to create a job profile that includes the wishes of the parties involved in the recruitment process. This gives you the opportunity to involve the parties further in the process when the Matchscore may reveal that their dream candidate has not applied for the job. Aligning expectations in this way allows everyone to avoid the dissatisfaction that arises when management says that ‘we need a new employee who can do it all’, but instead ends up with a new employee who can do only half, and perhaps some other things.
The poorer match between the job profile and the candidate profile can instead be used to trigger some thinking about how the candidate can still be successful, even if the person is not 100% what the company was originally looking for.
Obviously, the first consideration is whether you can live with the candidate having slightly different competences than the ones you asked for, or whether the recruitment phase should simply be restarted. In making that decision, it is important to consider the following three questions:
- How flexible is the job? Can some tasks and responsibilities be added or removed, such that the job matches the candidate’s competences better?
- Can other members of the team cover for the missing competences? Do some of the existing team members have gaps in areas where the candidate excels?
- Can the manager help and is there anything specific the manager needs to be aware of to enable the candidate to be successful? Here, the PTP report for the manager can help provide an overview of various points that the manager should be aware of when hiring the candidate.
If the workplace, even before welcoming the new employee, has given some thought to what should be added and removed from the job, what the manager should prepare for, and what colleagues should be aware of, then a candidate who may not have been the dream candidate on paper may end up being just the right one anyway.