Employee Profile: What Is It + How to Create One (free template)

Employees are at the heart of your organization. Knowing their professional skills, personal qualities, and motivations is crucial to business success.

That’s where employee profiles come into play. They keep indispensable staff information accessible, up-to-date, and scannable. So, you’ve got insights at your fingertips.

What is an employee profile?

An employee profile is a document that provides a comprehensive overview of an individual’s professional and personal attributes within an organization. It typically includes the employee’s name, contact details, job title, education, work experience, skills, achievements, career goals, hobbies, and interests. 

This information can help improve collaboration, hiring, talent management, team culture, and communication among team members and managers. It can also help showcase the company’s brand values, culture, and diversity.

Top benefits of employee profiling

Here are some of the top benefits of employee profiling:

Simplifying internal operations

Employee profiles compile essential information about everyone in your company. So they have multiple applications for internal operations, such as helping:

• HR teams maintain company policies in line with data security and legal requirements.
• Recruiters find relevant candidates within the company or create candidate personas based on the current top-performing profile.
• Managers prepare performance reviews and trace historical reviews. 
• Leaders make informed decisions about talent management – project assignments, promotions, and career development.

Connecting remote & hybrid teams

In remote and hybrid environments, a centralized database of employee profiles can help teammates get to know each other, personally and professionally.

Let’s say an employee is working on a cross-functional project. Staff profiles will help them connect with all stakeholders and understand their roles clearly.

And connection can go beyond the workplace. Employees who’ve listed their hobbies can find colleagues who share similar interests. 

Facilitating new hire onboarding

New hires need to get familiar with the organizational structure, managers, and teammates. Employee profiles compile all that data, helping you onboard new employees and promote peer-to-peer learning.

Onboarding is not all about paperwork. It’s the process of helping a new employee accommodate in your organization and culture. With employee profiles, you’re giving new hires access to invaluable information – the personality traits of their teammates, the career progression of their manager, your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, and more.

Let’s imagine a recent hire is browsing your employee profile database. They see that most seniors on their team have been with your company for years, gradually rising to their current roles. Your new recruit learns that your organization values employee loyalty and provides career advancement opportunities.

Improving work policies and culture

Employee profiles give you insights about your entire workforce so that you can create company policies and culture around your employees.

For instance, if you noticed a technical skill lacking in one of your teams members, plan knowledge-sharing sessions with other teams. Or, if these skills are not up to par across your company, you can organize external training. 

With a clear overview of all employees, you are in a position to:

• Build a transparent employee-centric culture.
• Increase employee engagement by introducing coaching or mentorship programs. 
• Draft work policies that account for the specific needs of your organization.
• Spot areas for improvement, such as lack of diversity or workforce imbalances.

Enhancing employer branding

Employee profiles make a great addition to your employer branding efforts – how you market your brand to potential candidates. 

While employee profiles are internal documents, they also have external applications. With your employees’ consent, you can feature your workforce on your website or social media. This puts a face to your organization and makes it more approachable. 

Apparel company Lululemon actively uses LinkedIn to support its employer brand. Every employee who goes under the spotlight gives insight into different roles and teams across the organization.

A report from Glassdoor shows that 75% of job seekers consider employer branding when applying for roles. Thus, staff profiles can help connect with talent who share your company’s values and fill openings quicker than before.

What should be included in an employee profile?

There is no universal format for an employee profile, but it is a good idea to create a custom template that works for your business. 

You can pick and choose what to include in your employee profile template. Consider these common categories:

• Basic details – full name, preferred nicknames, pronouns, date of birth, location, joining date, job title, department.
• Contact information – work email, phone number, and social media account links.
• Work history and responsibilities – career path within and outside your organization. Similar to a resume, it details their previous and current employers, roles, and responsibilities.
• Education background – what degree they obtained, in what field, and from where. In this section, you can also host a list of job-specific licenses and certifications.
• Achievements – personal and professional accomplishments that employees are most proud of. If your company runs a recognition program, present awards in this section.
• Career goals – employee’s professional ambitions. Managers can use this information to aid employees in their desired career development while aligning personal and company goals.
• Skills and competencies – soft and hard skills. There are diverse methods to evaluate employees’ skills, from peer reviews to simulation exercises. Based on the results, you can create individual development plans, mentor matches, or effectively assign employees to new projects. 
• Character traits and strengths – parts of an employee’s personality that influence how they approach tasks and work with others. Understanding your and others’ specifics is becoming increasingly crucial for employee engagement. In light of the 2021 great resignation and 2022 wave of quiet quitting, WorkTech companies are developing solutions that enable team communication based on everyone’s personality traits and strengths.
• Hobbies and interests – an insight into employees outside of work. Allowing employees to connect on a personal level creates a sense of connection and community. Indirectly, it affects teamwork, in-company communication, and job satisfaction.

How to create employee profiles

Let’s look at how to create employee profiles in five simple steps.

1. Set clear goals

First, think about why you want workforce profiles. Is your main objective to support HR operations or to improve company culture?

Your goals will dictate the type of information you collect from employees. And which sections are optional or mandatory.

2. Create a template

You can create a template or implement an employee profiling solution that meets your organization’s needs. 

When choosing a template, consider the following aspects:

• Profiles must follow a standardized format so that they’re easy to skim. At the same time, allow some flexibility to address workforce diversity like affiliations or pronoun preferences. 
• Keyword search options can help you find essential information faster.
• Examples and clear instructions for employees can improve the overall quality of their profile data. Video tutorials or walkthroughs are more practical than meetings for large or dispersed workforces.

Employee profile template with an example

Here’s an example of a basic employee profile that includes essential categories. 

Full Name: John Roe
Location: Toronto, Canada

Email address: johnroe@company.com
Start Date: 2023/01/01
Department: HR
Job Title: Recruitment Specialist

Reports to: HR Manager
Manages: n/a

3. Engage your workforce

One of the challenges of creating detailed worker profiles is having everyone in your organization fill theirs. 

When introducing profiling, you have to create profiles for all existing employees. Instead of making it mandatory, opt for an approach that’ll get everyone on board. 

Here’s how:

Explain the purpose and benefits of employee profiling – why you’re implementing them and how they’ll benefit your workforce. Also, seek feedback from your employees so you can address any concerns. With a transparent strategy, your workforce is more likely to fill profiles, keep them up-to-date, and leverage them. 

Implement interactive ways to encourage data collection. For example, you can gamify the experience by integrating it with a recognition program. Or use Buzzfeed-style quizzes to make the process fun and engaging. This approach will be most applicable to the “Character traits and strengths” and “Hobbies and interests” sections.

4. Choose a data storage solution

Depending on your company’s size and needs, you can keep profiles in different locations such as: 

• The company intranet.
• Employee directory software. Some popular options include Pingboard, BambooHR, and Bitrix24. 
• Document management system. Google Drive and DocuPhase are great for documentation storage.

When evaluating your options, consider that employee profiles need to be accessible to everyone in your organization while ensuring data privacy.

5. Share profiles across your organization

Once all employee profiles are ready, it’s time to share them with everyone so they can start using them.

Prepare an onboarding video to demonstrate how employee profiles are relevant to people in different roles. Address the main use cases – for HR, managers, or specialists. Store this video alongside other training materials as it will be handy for new hires. This employee data comes in handy when you launch L&D initiatives like mentoring programs and want to match mentors and mentees across the organization.

Keep profiles up-to-date

Employee profiles are not static and any changes to your workforce need to be reflected in them. The quality of your data will determine the quality of your employee records. So to keep profiles reliable, you need to update them regularly.

To manage this process effectively, decide who’ll own it. Typically, this is HR because they have multiple touchpoints with all employees. But it could also be managers who are chief decision makers for any changes on their team.