Personas are more often associated with marketing departments, where “buyer personas” are created to have a complete profile of a customer to aid in marketing decisions. But the same can be done when assessing the ideal candidate for a particular role.
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What is a Candidate Persona?
Let’s start by taking a look at what a candidate persona is. Simply put, a candidate persona is an on-paper profile of the (fictional) perfect candidate for a role. The hiring team works together to get a comprehensive picture of what experience, skills, and attributes such a person might have and creates this “persona” to reflect what that might look like. It’s likely that you and your hiring team are already doing this in an informal way when you create job descriptions and experience requirements, even if you don’t use candidate personas yet.
While that perfect candidate that matches the candidate persona may not exist in real life, the candidate persona helps the recruiting team get a clearer picture of what they’re looking for. This can help recruiters establish which characteristics are valued most in an applicant and can also help to narrow down the real candidates once applications are collected.
Why Use a Candidate Persona in Your Recruiting Process?
Using candidate personas allows the employer to:
- Get everyone on the hiring team on the same page when it comes to what type of candidate the organization is looking for and how best to try to find that person.
- Adapt the job description to note the most important characteristics the organization is looking for.
- Put more emphasis on understanding what the ideal candidate will want out of the job, thus allowing external communications about the job to be more targeted.
- Tailor how job postings are worded so that they are more likely to attract that ideal candidate.
- Focus on the right type of candidate to quickly find a good fit for the role.
- Better understand potential benefits the ideal candidate may be interested in, and consider modifying the company benefit options accordingly.
- Have a better feel for which recruiting strategies make the most sense to attract the ideal candidate, which can allow the organization to be more targeted in recruiting efforts.
- Have a better chance at recruiting people who will be a good fit with the organizational values.
- Work toward building a positive employment brand by showing a clear concern for employee needs.
Now that we’ve talked a bit about what a candidate persona is and why it may be helpful in your recruiting efforts, come back for tomorrow’s Advisor, where we’ll give an overview of how to create a candidate persona.