This is a guest post from Caroline Vooght Business Unit Director at Expion Search & Selection, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Caroline shares her thoughts on how to create the perfect persona.
What’s a persona? And what does it have to do with me as a Recruiter?
It’s a great question. But it’s an important one for the recruitment profession and it’s easy to overlook when running a busy desk or business.
Any respected marketer will have multiple personas for their market. A persona is a profile of a customer of their business. It’s like a personality profile and focuses on a customer’s behaviours, likes, dislikes and their interests. It also goes into depth about where they ‘hang out’ online, where they might shop, content they respond to. It’s like a Top Trump card of your ideal buyer.
What’s the relevance? Well, this allows the marketer to talk directly to a customer in a language they associate with, in places they spend time (online or in-person) and with content that is likely to resonate with them.
So, it would make sense to do this when creating the ideal candidate profile right? Spending time with the hiring manager to really understand the candidate you’re looking for. Makes sense. But as recruiters, how often do we do this? Do we really ask all the questions we need to? If you’re at a certain stage in your career it’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘another one of those please’.
If Covid’s taught me anything, it’s that we have to evolve. If you continue to do the same stuff, you’ll go backwards. Back in the day, there was a recruiter called Tony Byrne. Google him. He was a rather enthusiastic, yet unusual character and very ‘80’s in his approach to recruitment but whilst we chuckled at his training videos, they made a heck of a lot of sense.
Now, this is where we can delve into the 30 steps. Step 6. Candidate Profile. This is where Tony started to really get excited. He went into great detail about how to ask the hiring manager for the full low down on the job, the profile of the candidate and the salary (and package but that’s a whole other blog!). What we learnt from Tony was that it’s OK to ask lots of questions. The better you know the role and the candidate profile, the better recruiter you can be.
So, whilst we scribble furiously taking all the information from the hiring manager, nodding in agreement and trying to wiggle a few extra thousand on the budget for the role, how much of this do we actually record? With the best of intentions, I’d suggest, not that much. So why not build a persona of a candidate? Much more value-adding, and when you consider every recruitment campaign is really a marketing campaign, it all comes together.
Creating a persona involves research and time. But it will give you the edge on your competition and mean you have a much higher success rate of finding the very best people for a role.
Here’s what I’d consider a good start point to building a persona. There’s no substitute for research so if you’re serious about this, spend some time getting this right.
- Qualifications/Work experience/Things they need to know and have done (this is where most people stop)
- Where are they now and what job(s) do they currently do or have done (some people will get to this)
- Where do they spend time? How can we find them? This is where you need to start to think. Are they crawling the job boards, are they active on LinkedIn or Twitter or are they found attending online webinars about their industry/area of expertise? If you don’t see much LinkedIn activity for these types of candidates, InMails are unlikely to get you far
- What are their career goals and motivations? Nah, not a trick question. Just sit and think. Talk to candidates and use their insight. Sales Manager are aspiring Sales Directors (mostly) as they tend to be competitive creatures and strive to be the best, so use this logic in your research
- Linked to the above – what kind of work environment are they in? What are they likely to aspire to?
- What are their work pressures and traits? Think about when to target your ideal candidate persona. Approaching people who are in meetings ALL day won’t yield a favourable response, you need to reach out early or late in the day
- What content do they respond to? This is a canny way of catching someone’s eye but if you put time and effort into building a relationship by sharing relevant content, you’ll be doing 90% more than anyone else already
Now you’ve got the bare bones of a persona. Go back to the job description and make sure there’s alignment. Talk to your client about the persona you’ve created, and if there are areas you’re not sure of. And share this information with the candidate. Let them know what the client wants so they can make sure they’re aligned, and if they are, should really buy them into the role and the process.
What are the other benefits?
- If you know your persona, you’ll know where to advertise a role. For example. if you’re recruiting millennials, your ad needs to be mobile-friendly
- Reduce time to hire. Win, win for everyone and avoids wasting time on candidates who aren’t right for the role or the business
- Reduce cost per hire. If you’re targeting your personas correctly, you won’t waste time or resources advertising in the wrong places ‘just in case’ or waste valuable time in pointless conversations
- Offer acceptance rate rises. If you’ve met the needs of the career goals and motivations, you’ll massively increase the chance of a ‘YES’
- New recruits are more likely to stay with a client and use you when they recruit for their team as you’ll have given them a recruitment experience they won’t have experienced elsewhere
Finally, don’t overcomplicate this and create a long, long list of criteria. Go back to your must-haves and eliminate some aspects if needed.
You won’t find a unicorn, but you could find the best way to be amazing at what you do.
Caroline Vooght, Unit Director at Expion Search & Selection:
I’m a recruiter with 20+ years of experience. I’ve built and led recruitment teams and developed my own skills to include digital marketing and employer branding. I’m a mentor, and I also volunteer in schools to support students with interviews skills and CV writing.
