Most recruiters say the sourcing stage is the most challenging part of the hiring process. To effectively attract candidates who not only meet the required qualifications but also align with the team and organizational culture, you need to take the time to gain insight into the type of person you hope to hire.
That’s where candidate personas come in. In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to create detailed persona profiles that provide an all-encompassing overview of your ideal candidate so you can craft relevant content and messaging.
Ready to get started? Access our easy-to-use template to create your candidate persona profiles.
Candidate personas help recruiting professionals get a deeper understanding of the talent they hope to hire. Unlike a standard job description, candidate personas offer more detailed information about your ideal candidate by combining both professional backgrounds and personal attributes.
A candidate persona not only includes skills and qualifications but also demographic information, personal interests, career aspirations, and motivations. Going through the exercise of building a persona profile helps you gain a strong understanding of the type of individual who would thrive in your organization, ultimately leading to better hires and improved retention.
Building a well-rounded candidate persona involves more than just identifying basic qualifications. It’s all about understanding who your ideal candidate is, what motivates them, and how to effectively engage with them. By answering these questions, you can create a more targeted recruiting approach.
Understanding the candidate's background helps you identify key characteristics they may have. This includes demographics, skills, and traits that help you start to envision the right person for the job.
Delving into what drives your ideal candidate helps you align what you offer with their personal and professional goals. By understanding their aspirations and concerns, you can tailor your recruiting messaging to attract the right talent.
How you communicate and where your candidates find job-related information drives successful engagement. To capture candidates’ attention, it’s important to meet them where they are and provide the messaging that resonates most with them.
Including candidate background, motivations, and engagement sections in your profiles results in detailed candidate personas that set the stage for a successful hiring process.
To fully appreciate the value of candidate personas, you and your team also need to understand how not to think about these profiles. Always remember that a candidate persona is not:
A candidate persona doesn’t just rehash a job requisition in bullet point format. It delves into the personality traits, motivations, and values that make someone an ideal fit for your specific company.
While persona profiles inform your employer brand (which is the centerpiece of all your hiring-related messaging), creating unique profiles for each role is important. Additionally, candidate personas should be continuously updated to reflect your organization’s growth and changes in culture, as well as shifts in the job market.
Creating detailed candidate personas can significantly improve various aspects of your recruiting efforts. When done effectively, you’ll see the impact persona profiles have on the key metrics you use to measure hiring success, such as:
Be sure to take the time and effort required to create accurate and thoughtful candidate personas and you’ll experience multiple benefits that elevate your recruiting strategy.
Now that you understand what to include in a candidate persona and the benefits these profiles bring to your hiring process, you’re likely wondering how to go about finding the necessary information. Following these steps will help you create accurate candidate personas that make a real impact on your recruiting efforts.
Gaining insight into how the companies you compete with for talent approach hiring sets the table for effective candidate personas. Start by reviewing their job postings, career sites, and employee reviews, as well as analyze their employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts.
Once you have a clear picture of your competitors' strategies, you can decide how to differentiate your approach. Consider if you want to compete for the same talent, or target a different type of candidate. This research will inform how you craft your candidate personas and use these profiles to attract overlooked or untapped talent.
Now you’re ready to learn more about your ideal candidates—and the best people to talk to are your hiring managers and employees. Hiring managers naturally have an in-depth understanding of the roles you’re looking to fill. They can provide insights into the skills and experiences crucial for success and the personality traits that fit well within their teams. Ask questions like:
In addition, interviewing top-performing employees can provide authentic insights into what makes someone thrive in your organization. These conversations can help you define soft skills, values, and even challenges and fears to include in candidate personas. Ask questions like:
Surveys help you gather persona profile information directly from your ideal candidates. These surveys can uncover details about their preferences, challenges, and expectations, which are difficult to surface through other research methods. Consider asking survey questions focused on:
When used in combination with hiring manager and employee interviews, candidate surveys help you collect all the information needed to flesh out your candidate personas.
Soft skills and cultural fit are harder to determine than technical qualifications but can be more important to long-term success and employee retention. During your interviews with employees and hiring managers, and in your candidate surveys, try to learn how ideal candidates communicate, solve problems, and collaborate with others. These insights will make up the most compelling aspects of candidate personas and help you attract the right candidate when you start the hiring process.
Knowing where your ideal candidates spend their time online helps you create an effective recruitment marketing strategy. For example, most corporate professionals are likely networking and job searching on LinkedIn, while younger candidates or those in creative industries are connecting on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Additionally, there are niche online communities that serve specific professions and industries—providing excellent opportunities to connect with the exact talent you hope to hire.
By understanding where your candidates are (and including this information in your persona profiles), you can get your employer brand messaging and even open jobs in front of the right people.
Once you’ve gathered information through research, surveys, and conversations with hiring managers and employees, it’s time to analyze the data and create your candidate personas. Look for patterns and recurring themes across different sources. Consider what makes sense to you while noting any surprising or counterintuitive findings.
As you make sense of the data, start to fill in the different sections of your candidate persona profiles (you can get our easy-to-use template here). Remember, you’ll need to create personas on a role-by-role basis for this exercise to be truly effective.
Before finalizing your candidate personas, it’s important to validate your findings with key stakeholders. Present your initial persona profiles to hiring managers, HR team members, and even some of the employees you interviewed. Their feedback can help ensure you correctly interpret the information they provided and created personas that accurately reflect the types of candidates you're seeking. This collaborative approach not only helps you refine your candidate personas but also get buy-in from some of the people who will use these profiles going forward.
As previously mentioned, creating candidate personas is not a one-time exercise. The job market, candidate preferences, and your company's needs evolve over time, so it’s important to regularly revisit and update your personas.
Schedule quarterly or bi-annual reviews to ensure your candidate personas are up-to-date and relevant. Along the way, gather feedback from new hires, stay informed about industry trends, and continuously analyze the performance of your recruiting efforts.
Candidate personas aren’t just used to attract talent when actively hiring. They also play a critical role in shaping your ongoing recruitment marketing strategy. By understanding the specific qualities and motivations of your ideal candidates, you can tailor marketing efforts to better engage them. Candidate personas inform the content that is targeted at your ideal candidates, whether that be job descriptions, career site content, employee stories, or social media campaigns.
For example, if a specific candidate persona values work-life balance, you can create content showcasing what your employees do outside of work. If career development is important to them, you could feature an employee who has climbed the ranks in your organization.
Additionally, knowing where your candidates spend their time online and their preferred communication channels ensures the content you create actually reaches them.
Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the core message that defines what your organization offers to its employees. A strong alignment between your EVP and your candidate personas helps talent envision themselves as part of your organization, making it easier to attract individuals who share similar values and goals.
The key here is that your EVP should align with your collective personas since it’s the focal point of all your recruitment marketing messaging. For instance, if the majority of your candidate personas are highly motivated by career development opportunities, your EVP could emphasize continuous learning and career progression. This alignment will help you create a unified message that attracts best-fit candidates for every role you hire for.
Once your candidate personas are created, you can use them to create and distribute relevant content and messaging to the right people. Here are specific ways you can use persona profiles in your recruitment marketing efforts:
Creating candidate personas empowers you to make well-rounded hires. By understanding your ideal candidates on a deeper level, you can craft messaging that resonates with and reaches qualified talent who perfectly match your organizational culture.
Get started on your candidate personas now with our simplified template!
