Candidate personas can change the way your recruit

The major goal of any recruitment agency should be the hiring of the best person for the job. While it might seem obvious that a good fit would solve this problem, recruitment agencies generally fail to do this. This is because they are too focused on what they want and not on what the company wants. This is a huge problem and leads to low quality employees. A way around this problem is a process called candidate personas. The process is very simple. You ask your recruitment agency to put forward potential candidate personas. You then use this information to decide what type of candidate you want to recruit. Over time, you will get better and better at this and your candidates will miraculously be good fit for the company culture.

What are candidate personas?

A candidate persona is a fictional representation of a typical person you might hire for your organization. A persona includes basic details about the individual, but describes the person in terms of their interests, needs, motivations and goals. This provides a clear picture of the type of person that your company is trying to attract. Therefore by having a target, you can greatly improve your recruitment strategy.

How to create candidate personas

1. Collect data

Firstly, look within your internal company to find your best hires. Collect detailed information on background, skills, goals and attributes. Taking this data, you should start to identify trends. These trends might be related to where they found the job from, what goals they have or if they handle pressure well. Using these pieces of data, you will slowly be able to piece together a persona.

2. Build your persona

Taking the trends and themes found because you can start to build a persona. This persona is not an ideal candidate but rather acts as a framework for hiring. Personas must be updated over time and built for different roles. The persona should be similar to some buyer personas you may have made.

3. Utilise this persona

Finally, use this persona to improve job descriptions and sourcing passive candidates. Thus, this will help you attract your ideal candidate.

The benefits of having candidate personas

There are several benefits to having a defined candidate persona:

• Higher employee satisfaction and retention – This is for two reasons. Firstly, you will hire the right people for the company based on skills and motives. Secondly, you will hire person with the best company culture fit.
• More effective recruiting – Defining the exact people you want to target will result in greater accuracy of recruiting. You will no longer need to post ads across several websites. Further, you will be able to create more tailored content. You also will be able to directly target people via certain sites. All of this will reduce the time and cost that it takes to hire.
• Greater chance of offer acceptance – Attracting your set persona will allow for higher chance of acceptance. This is due to the fact that you can approach them in a more tailored manner. You can directly appeal to their needs, this leads to more incentive to accept.
• Improvement of company employer brand – Having good quality of hires and creating a good work environment will improve your own company brand. This in turn has continual benefits of attracting better talent in the future as well as improving overall company image.

Next steps

After building your persona, look to use platforms like Triggr. Triggr has advanced filters and real time alerts so you can get the best candidates faster. Following this, you can use applicant tracking platforms such as Lever and iCIMS.