Successful recruitment begins with understanding what to look for in a candidate. That’s where you can come into play with personas. Developing personas for your candidates is an essential way to identify what qualities you’re looking for, according to experts, and it can lead to better hires. What’s more, with 70% of recruiters claiming that the biggest hiring challenge is talent shortages, developing a list of people can help you find talented candidates that you might otherwise overlook.
It’s important to talk about how to do it before we dive into why you should develop personas. If you are familiar with the concept of people in marketing, you understand that they are used accordingly to identify ideal clients and target marketing campaigns. Candidate individuals are largely the same, and by identifying the key characteristics of your top performers, the best way to come up with them is. Start by outlining a list of these features, then use them to create your persona. Pro Tip: Aim for at least three to five people and try to be as inclusive as possible when the character traits for each one are established.
How candidate persona help
Candidate personas are an approach to understanding your target talent audience that is research-driven. While marketers use buyer personas as a representation of the ideal clients of a company, recruiters and professionals in the acquisition of talent can create candidates to develop a strategy focused on exactly who you need to hire.
It can help you create more relevant job content, including job titles and descriptions, as well as the data you provide on your career website and other branding channels for employers. At the same time, you can understand better which recruitment channels are preferred by your talent audience. These people generate alignment across your team, above all, so that everyone can be on the same page about the most efficient sourcing strategies.
Help you identify your ideal types of candidates
One of the big advantages of recruiting candidates is that they can help you get a clear sense of what an ideal candidate looks like for your particular team. For instance, if you are looking for someone who is also an effective leader with strong tech skills, creating a person around this type of candidate can help you identify those skills more easily when interviewing potential employees. This process can also help you evaluate how your organization’s success is measured, and which types of candidates are most likely to thrive there.
Increase the probability of a good culture fit
Few things are as essential as finding employees who interact with the company’s culture, and candidate personas are a great way to identify the most important characteristics. Whether you’re looking for someone who is hard-working, versatile, or well-versed in a variety of skills, building them into your person is a good way to ensure that you are aware of these qualities when hiring. This does not necessarily mean that all of your candidates need to have all of these qualities, but it does mean that when creating your personas and applying them to your hiring strategy, you should consider all of them.
Help you to find the best recruiting strategies
One of the lesser-known advantages of creating candidate personas is that they can help you determine which strategies to use with each type of candidate for recruitment. This is about identifying the abilities and personality characteristics of your ideal employees and determining which methods of recruitment are likely to resonate with them most effectively. If you want to hire software engineers, for example, attending a tech-focused meeting can be a good way to connect and engage with the types of candidates you are looking for in a comfortable environment. Although this does not necessarily mean that you have to adjust the recruitment method to accommodate each applicant, it will make it easier to connect with them in a meaningful way by getting insights into what your candidates are looking for.
Conclusion
It can certainly take some time to create candidate personas, but it can also be an extremely efficient recruiting tool. What’s more, while giving our recruiting team the best chance of success, it can help you streamline your recruiting process.
