Are We Aiming at the Right Target? How to Sharpen Your Ideal Candidate Profile

When it comes to hiring, technical skills are only part of the equation. Defining—and accurately assessing—the behavioral competencies of a role is just as critical to making the right hire. This article outlines a data-driven, pragmatic method to refine candidate profiling and improve hiring outcomes.

Beware of Bias—Even Before the Interview

We know interviews can be vulnerable to bias. But what’s less acknowledged is how early bias can sneak into the process—right when we define the “ideal candidate.” It can be easy to think in stereotypes (for example, a good salesperson should be aggressive and money-oriented), or to let the similarity bias creep in (I imagine the person I am looking for as similar to myself), or the compensation bias, where I see my own weakness, which I struggle with, as the most important competency element. That’s why establishing a valid and objective candidate profile is both vital and challenging.

From Job Descriptions to Real-World Behaviors

How to distill the competencies needed for success in a specific role? While standard job descriptions offer a good starting point, they’re not enough on their own. That’s where the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) comes in—a qualitative method that collects real-life examples of effective and ineffective behaviors on the job. Interviews and focus groups using CIT go beyond generic tasks, spotlighting specific actions that made a real difference in performance. The tradeoff? CIT data is rich, but subjective. Stories may not represent all relevant scenarios, and memory bias can affect accuracy.

Quantify What Matters

Here’s the key idea: have your current employees complete behavioral assessments and correlate those results with performance outcomes. Sounds simple? The details get complex fast. Which tools should you use? How do you analyze small datasets? Traditional analytics like regression and t-tests require large samples, which many organizations—especially for niche roles—don’t have.

Use Wide-Band Questionnaires to Uncover Hidden Insights

Ideally, you’ll have ability tests tailored to the job. But these often don’t cover the full range of behavioral competencies. Broader, research-backed questionnaires like the Trait-Map personality assessment and OD-Tools’s MQ motivation questionnaire (used in the method we developed) can help. These wide-band tools cast a broader net—capturing unexpected traits that may correlate with performance and helping you discover what you might not have thought to look for.

A Swiss Army Knife for Data Analysis

Here’s a practical, flexible data analysis method to sharpen your candidate profile with data—even with small sample sizes.

Select a subset of Top Performers and Bottom Performers from your current workforce. The trends observed in the data from these two subsets will be compared to the effective and counterproductive behaviors identified by the CIT. Ideally, you should have at least 5 people in each subset. The more is the better, but you can start using this method even with less people.

For data analysis, use the standardized results from the primary scales of the questionnaires. This is always available in the form of an Excel export for the OD-Tools instruments, and consists of 25 variables for Trait-Map and 34 for MQ. The standardized scores range from 1 to 10 and the overall mean is always 5.5. For each scale, calculate the mean and standard deviation per subset.

Mark those scales where the mean of your subsets is above 7.5 or below 3.5, these may be of interest. Also, mark the scales where the difference between the mean of your two subsets is greater than 2.

And finally, mark the scales where the standard deviation is low (less than 1.5). Pay particular attention to the standard deviation values in the subset of Top Performers. A low standard deviation here indicates that the results on the scale in question are close to each other, which means your high performers responded similarly to those questionnaire items. The smaller the standard deviation (e.g. below 1.2 or 1), the more likely we are to see an important trend. We can also rely on the standard deviation this way to find behaviors where the high performers score in the middle (the golden mean is the sweet spot).

Use these threshold values as flexible guidelines, not rigid rules. In practice, aim to highlight no more than 25–30% of the total scales to avoid analysis overload.

Validate with Context

Once you’ve identified traits linked to performance, revisit your qualitative data. Do these traits align with what emerged from CIT interviews or job descriptions? Sit down with team members closest to the role—they can explain surprising results and help validate the findings. Especially with small samples, some trends may be statistical flukes. Only integrate patterns that both the data and the qualitative input support.

A Real-World Example: B2B Sales

The following example shows the application of this method for a B2B sales role in a global services company using the Trait-Map tool. The green cells indicate the ideal score ranges, and the numbers in the triangles indicate the strength of the trends found.

The best performers scored high on the Optimism, Competitiveness, Networking, Drive traits, which is consistent with the general stereotype. But not all the identified trends are common sense. For example, those with extreme high scores on Persuasiveness (9s and 10s) weren’t likely the best performers. Is it a coincidence, or is it a pattern? According to managers familiar with the job, the most common pitfall in this role is talking too much and listening too little. This insight emphasized the need to assess not just persuasive ability, but also questioning and active listening skills in interviews.

Final Takeaway

This blended approach - combining qualitative insights with our quantitative “Swiss Army Knife” method - provides a flexible, scalable way to sharpen your candidate targeting. It also lays the groundwork for using questionnaires effectively and crafting more strategic, behaviorally aligned interviews.

When done right, using questionnaires isn’t just about assessing candidates—it’s about making sure you’re aiming at the right target from the start.

Originally published in Behaviour Magazine (https://behaviour.hu/).