Ideal Candidate Profile: How to Create One with AI [Example Included]

In these situations, it’s often not candidates who are the problem — it’s that you don’t know exactly who you’re looking for.

This is where an ideal candidate profile (ICP) can be the perfect solution. Creating an ideal candidate profile for your vacancy will guide you through the recruitment process, from sourcing to making hiring decisions, to ensure you’re only spending time on the right candidates for your roles.

Here's how to craft a candidate profile that attracts the right talent and streamlines your recruitment process.

What is an Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP)?

An ideal candidate profile is an internal document that details the skills and qualifications of someone who would be considered the perfect candidate for a particular role you’re recruiting for. It’s like a hiring manager’s blueprint for their dream candidate.

Creating an ideal candidate profile helps you better understand who exactly you’re trying to recruit so you can be much more strategic with your approach.

In this sense, it’s helpful to think of ICPs as a recruitment-specific version of a buyer profile, which marketers use when deciding who their ideal customers are and how to reach them.

Unlike job profiles - which provide details about a job so that candidates can decide if it’s the right opportunity for them - candidate profiles detail out the competencies and skills required, to help recruiters assess the suitability of applicants for a specific role.

Why ICPs are important in recruitment

There are a few reasons why ideal candidate profiles are important tools to include in your recruitment strategy. They allow you to do the following:

Create better job descriptions and adverts

Using your ideal candidate profile when creating your job descriptions will help you craft job adverts that help candidates self-select.

They’re particularly useful when creating the candidate-focused ‘you’ll love this job if...’ section of your job adverts, as these let potential candidates decide if they fit the profile.

It can be tempting to be intentionally vague in job descriptions to increase your pool of applicants during skills shortages. But in reality, all this does is create more work for you. ICPs keep your job description clear and relevant so it only attracts the right type of people to your role.

Target your sourcing

ICPs also give you the information you need to be a lot more targeted with your sourcing strategy. What’s the point in focusing all your energy and resources on LinkedIn and job boards if your ideal candidates don’t spend time there because they’re not actively looking for a new job right now?

By gaining a better understanding of who your perfect candidates are and where to find them, you’ll spend more time and budget sourcing on the right channels.

Improve your candidate interviews

A good candidate profile will help you focus on asking the right interview questions and assessing candidates for the qualities that actually matter, as opposed to nice-to-have skills. Otherwise, you can easily waste time asking questions that aren’t directly relevant to the role.

Use the information you gather to develop role-specific behavioural interview questions that target the specific qualities outlined in your ICP. This should lead to more insightful and relevant candidate interviews, which make it easier for you to hire the right type of person for the role.

Strengthen your employer branding

Candidate profiles can help hiring teams understand the most important parts of their employer branding to highlight in order to attract the right candidates.

Showcasing your company culture and values in the right light will help you attract top talent who aligns with your company vision.

For example, say your ICP has highlighted that you need your new hire to be creative and resourceful so they align with your company value of innovation. But does your employer branding material also reflect that you’re a company that cares about being forward-thinking and innovative?

If you’re looking for candidates with these sorts of qualities, it’s likely they’ll be looking for an employer that cares about innovation too. An ICP can highlight if there’s a misalignment between who you’re looking for and what you can offer them as an employer.

Mitigate hiring bias

An objective ideal candidate profile mitigates unconscious bias during the selection process by creating a standardized framework that all recruiters and hiring managers need to follow.

When you standardize the evaluation criteria during the hiring process, this ensures it’s objective and consistent. If candidates’ skills and profiles are assessed against the same criteria and nothing is left to a recruiter’s preferences, it leaves no room for bias.

Referring back to your ICP throughout the recruitment process can help standardise everything from your selection process, candidate interviews, and any final hiring decisions you make.

Reduce time to hire

A reduced time-to-hire is a natural byproduct of using a candidate profile to guide your recruitment strategy.

ICPs make your whole hiring process much more streamlined and relevant by focusing your recruitment team’s time and effort in the right places and ensuring you’re only speaking to candidates who are qualified and likely to make it to further in the interview process.

Naturally, this increases the likelihood of you hiring the right candidates faster.

What to include in an Ideal Candidate Profile

There are a few main components you’ll want to include in your ideal candidate profile to ensure it’s doing its job:

• Essential skills and experience: List the hard skills, technical skills, and soft skills required for the role, as well as potential previous work experience and competencies. Prioritize these based on importance, putting the most important ones at the top.
• Educational background: Specify any candidate experience, degrees, or certifications necessary to be successful in the role. Be open to equivalent experience if qualifications are flexible.
• Job duties: Outline the job duties and responsibilities of the role that the new hire will be expected to manage.
• Work style and personality: Describe the ideal candidate's work style (e.g. independent, collaborative), personality traits (e.g. adaptable, detail-oriented), and cultural fit.
• Career goals and motivations: Understanding a candidate's career aspirations can predict their long-term commitment to the role and whether they’re a good investment for the company.

Of course, the exact makeup of your ideal candidate profile will differ depending on what’s important to you as a company and the type of role you're recruiting for.

However, these core points should act as a template, and you can use them as guidance for interviews and assessments, along with the ICP example below.

Example of an ICP for Product Marketer role

Job title: Product Marketer  

Team: Marketing

Key role objectives:

• To plan, manage and execute monthly marketing campaigns to attract new customers
• To manage the promotion of new product features to existing customers

Measurable outcomes:

• Generate monthly new customer sales leads per month from product marketing campaigns
• Meet existing customer upgrade revenue targets

Experience:

• BA in Marketing or Communications-related role
• 2+ years in a tech-focused marketing role

Skills:

• Excellent verbal and written communication
• Understanding of SaaS industry
• Problem-solving skills

Talents:

• Creative thinker
• Goal-focused

Behaviours:

• Detail orientated
• Team player
• Shows signs of leadership

Career goals:

• Ambitions to move into a management role

How to create an Ideal Candidate Profile with AI

When creating your own ICP for a role, it’s not a matter of just diving straight in to create a document like the ICP example above.

Crafting a profile that’s going to help you find the perfect new hire is a thorough process that takes time and research to get it right.

Step 1: Analyse the job

Start by analyzing the job description and responsibilities. With a tool like Carv, you can ask your AI workmate to create an ICP based on an intake call, with or without a job description or a job requirements document.

Once you have the drafted ICP, check with the hiring manager to see if all relevant details are included.

Often, you’ll find that what’s written in a job profile doesn’t totally align with what the hiring manager is envisaging for their new hire in practice, so these conversations can be really invaluable.

Step 2: Identify top performers

Identify high performers in similar roles at the company already. What makes them so successful in their role? What qualities, competencies do these current employees have? Do some digging to find out what work experiences they had even before joining the company.

Once you have this new input, feed it to your AI workmate and ask it to redo the ICP based on this new information.

Step 3: Assess company culture

Consider your company culture and the type of person who would thrive in it. It can be helpful to also think in terms of the types of job seekers who wouldn’t fit the culture when approaching this step.  

Same as before, you can feed this information to your AI assistant, so that your company culture is taken into consideration when drafting your final ICP.

Step 4: Think about future needs

Think about the skills and experience that will be important for the role and the company in the next 3-5 years. Are there plans to grow that particular team? Do you need a candidate who shows signs they’d work well in a leadership position later down the line?

Once you’ve covered all of the above, you’re in a position that you can start crafting your ideal candidate profile for the role.

How ICPs and JDs differ

After reading this, you might think the job description and Ideal Candidate Profile docs are similar. However, these two documents serve different purposes in the hiring process.

Here’s how they differ:

Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP)

• Focus: Describes the ideal candidate in a holistic manner.
• Attributes:
  • Personality traits: Focus on soft skills, traits, and cultural fit.
  • Ideal experience & background: Provides a narrative on the background and experiences that would make a candidate ideal for the role.
  • Soft skills & passions: Outlines personal characteristics, interests, and values that align with the company's culture and vision.
  • Team dynamics: Describes how the candidate fits into the team and company structure.
  • Holistic view: Offers a comprehensive view that goes beyond just skills and qualifications to include attributes like adaptability, curiosity, and resilience.

• Purpose: Used to guide recruiters and hiring managers in identifying the best-fit candidates who will thrive in the specific company culture and role context.

Job Requirements Document (JRD)

• Focus: Lists the minimum requirements and qualifications necessary to perform the job.
• Attributes:
  • Specific skills & competencies: Clear, often quantified requirements for technical and functional skills.
  • Experience: Specifies required years of experience and types of experience needed.
  • Education: Outlines the required educational background, such as degrees or certifications.
  • Responsibilities & tasks: Details specific daily tasks and key responsibilities associated with the role.
  • Key skills: Emphasizes mandatory skills and knowledge necessary to perform job duties.

• Purpose: Provides a clear, concise guideline for candidates to assess their eligibility for the role and often serves as the basis for job postings and advertisements.

Here’s a practical example.

ICP:

• Seeks an “outgoing and resilient” team member with “great communication skills” a “natural curiosity and intrinsic interest in AI.”
• Describes that the ideal candidate should enjoy “explaining AI concepts simply but correctly” and be “passionate about innovative solutions.”
• Focuses on cultural fit, emphasizing traits like “being able to think on their feet” and adaptability.

JRD:

• Requires “minimum 3 years in SaaS sales” and “familiarity with CRM systems, especially Salesforce.”
• Specifies that the candidate must “conduct demos, negotiate contracts, and close deals.”
• Lists mandatory requirements like “University degree preferred” and “proficiency in English.”

Thus, the ICP is more about painting a picture of the perfect candidate who will thrive and grow within the company, becoming a successful employee. The JRD, on the other hand, is a checklist of necessary qualifications to find quality candidates and filter out those who are not eligible for the role.

Both are crucial for different stages of the hiring process.

Over to you

By following these guidelines to create a well-defined ideal candidate profile, you can be confident you’ll achieve two of the most important outcomes of any recruitment challenge.

You’ll attract the best candidates to your vacancies, and streamline your hiring process so your recruiters have less workload.

To find out how Carv lightens the recruiter workload by handling interview-related admin, try it for free today.