You may be familiar with creating customer profiles. But what about candidate profiles? To attract the right candidates, recruiters need to know who they are, and exactly what they want from their next role. This is where candidate personas come in handy.
In today’s talent-driven economy, the best candidates can afford to be choosy. Skilled candidates now browse for the job that suits them best; they’re not just going to accept any offer, or stay in a job that’s not the right fit.
To attract the right candidates, recruiters need to know who they are, and exactly what they want from their next role. This is where candidate personas come in handy.
What is a candidate persona?
You may have heard of the term ‘buyer persona’, which has been used by traditional marketers to help understand their ideal customers. These profiles are used to help craft strategies that best meet commercial objectives and create compelling advertising campaigns.
Candidate personas work in the same way for recruiters, in that they represent an ideal candidate for a specific role.
These ‘personas’ are formulated based on real data, primary research and interviews. They’re a fantastic way to identify the right candidates for your business and streamline the recruitment process.
Five steps to creating your own candidate persona
The main benefit of candidate personas is that they aren’t just created on ‘gut-feel’. A good candidate persona is put in a written description and represents a hypothetical person with the ideal traits and characteristics for the role.
To create an accurate persona and get the best results, you’re going to have to do some research. Here are the five steps to getting the information you need.
- Identify trends in your top performers
What do your current superstar employees all have in common? Is it their education level, interests or past experience? If your HR system can provide this data, you can apply these insights into the profile of your ideal candidate.
- Use your own hiring data to discover channel insights
Next, take a look at how your best applicants and current employees found your business. Was it through referrals, your company website or job sites like Indeed? Incorporate this into your ideal candidate profile, so you can focus recruitment efforts on the channels that drive the best hires.
- Interview colleagues and hiring managers
Interview the people who understand the candidates your organisation needs. This includes hiring managers or talent acquisition leaders. Ask them about desired professional profiles and personality traits. And don’t forget to ask them about their own experiences of working with high quality candidates. You may uncover even more relevant insights to add to your persona.
- Interview your talent base
Now it’s time to get the inside story from the talent itself, such as current and potential employees. This is your chance to find out what makes them tick, what makes them uneasy and why they were attracted to your business in the first place. Many organisations use surveys to assess engagement. If that’s the case in your business, mix it up with some interviews so you have both quantitative AND qualitative data. This is an important step in understanding what exactly makes your business attractive to highly-skilled talent.
- Keep an eye on hiring trends in your industry
Secondary research such as labour market data can provide details on the nuances and behaviours of talent in particular jobs. For example, how often do they change jobs? What’s their average level of education? This information can then be used to further hone your candidate persona and ensure it’s realistic within the current job market.
Now pull it all together
You’ve done the hard part; now it’s time to create your candidate persona. There are various format options, but we suggest you include the following: their job title, experience level, what they care about and what attracts them.
How to use your candidate persona
Once you’ve completed the profile of your ideal candidate persona, you can use it to:
- Adjust your job description so it aligns with the voice of your company and the cultural fit you’re trying to attract;
- Evaluate your recruitment channels to ensure you’re investing in the ones that present the best opportunity to find the right people;
- Identify new sourcing opportunities based on the behaviours and career paths of your top performers; and
- Create targeted recruiting messages and employment branding ideas that incorporate your candidate recruitment funnel.
Creating hypothetical candidate personas can bring many benefits to your recruitment efforts. By having an in-depth understanding of the wants and needs of your ideal candidate, you’ll target your efforts more effectively, improve your candidate experience and boost your recruitment success rate.
With more than 15 years of experience in the recruitment industry, Jay Munro has worked in a variety of roles in agencies and job boards, from consulting and recruiting, through to leading the product development of new sourcing technologies. As an Employer Insights Strategist with the Indeed Employer Insights Team, Jay pairs platform data with industry trend analysis to share Indeed’s story and bring the value of the company’s programs and solutions to life.