Hiring the right candidate for the job can be challenging, primarily when recruiting for multiple positions with different skill sets and experience requirements. Figuring out which candidate will best suit your company can be daunting if you still need to define the person you need. 

That’s where creating a solid candidate persona comes in handy. 

What Is a Candidate Persona?

A candidate persona is a description of a fictional person used to recruit people with whom you can compare that person. The purpose of a candidate persona is to make recruitment more efficient by allowing you to target your efforts toward the most relevant candidates. 

The term comes from marketing, which extensively identifies the characteristics of people who purchase products or services in particular categories. To increase sales, many marketers create a fictitious persona that depicts a typical customer. 

Creating a candidate persona helps you focus your recruitment efforts and attract candidates that are a good fit for your company. The candidate persona allows you to clearly define which skills, education, experiences, and personality traits you want to see in candidates. 

A well-defined candidate persona will give insight into what attracts people to your organization and what repels them. Once you understand this, you can focus on attracting candidates who will be successful in your organization. 

In addition, using a candidate persona will also help you ask better interview questions and give you more helpful information when evaluating candidates. You also prevent other types of candidates from joining your team and damaging your business culture and turnover rate.

To create a usable persona profile, you need to plainly explain what the job candidate can provide for your organization when conducting interviews. 

For example, if you want a candidate with experience in test development and analysis, it is helpful to note this in your personas profile. This employment requirement will help determine how well the candidate can provide this fact during the assessment process of interviewing candidates.

How Can Recruiters Use Candidate Personas?

Candidate personas are essential for recruiters to identify the ideal candidate for a role. By creating a candidate persona, you can single out the skills, experience, and traits most important to your company. 

Use the information to create targeted recruitment campaigns to attract suitable candidates through a job advertising platform. Additionally, you can use candidate personas to assess which recruiting channels are most effective at reaching your target audience.

Here are ways in which you can implement candidate personas. 

Tailor Job Descriptions

Use a job description to choose the qualities and characteristics you want from a candidate. The job description is the first touchpoint between your enterprise and potential candidates. For example, suppose you are looking for a candidate who likes to work in an environment with high autonomy. In that case, you can easily tailor your job description by emphasizing specific skills. 

By tailoring your job descriptions to match your candidate personas, you’ll ensure you get candidates who are a good fit. Potential candidates can assess their compliance with your recruitment requirements to know whether they fit the open role. 

Reap the benefits of programmatic job advertising to improve your candidate persona hiring process. You also save time by avoiding going through applications from unqualified candidates. It is advisable to use a candidate persona template for your job description. 

Optimize Sourcing & Recruitment Marketing

Candidate personas serve as significant influencers to who you choose to send applications. An ideal candidate persona helps you optimize your recruitment marketing strategy by including the appropriate content that suits specific candidates. You can also use hiring events to optimize your sourcing and recruitment marketing. 

Once you develop candidate personas for all the roles at your organization, recruiters will only need to match their candidates with the proper job descriptions. Through persona-based recruiting, you save time and energy by not wasting it on unqualified or irrelevant candidates.

Advertising analytics can help you identify and target your advertising more effectively. By understanding who your ideal candidate is, what they’re looking for, and where they are in their career journey, you can create targeted ads that speak directly to them.

Candidates who meet your ideal candidate persona will be those most likely to excel in a given role, making them better fits than those who don’t match. As such, you reduce attrition rates among new hires.

Improve Recruitment Metrics

By using candidate personas, you can easily track how many and what kind of candidates apply for positions. For example, if you have a candidate persona that emphasizes scientific background, you can use recruitment metrics to evaluate which job positions attract the right people. 

This way, you can see which candidates should be reconsidered for another role or even not recruited. The candidate persona helps improve recruitment metrics by avoiding time and energy spent on the wrong applicants. Here are some of the metrics that benefit from creating candidate personas.

Time-to-Hire

Highlighting your candidate personas will help you target suitable candidates for your organization’s job openings. Persona recruitment ensures you have eligible candidates for each position, thus saving time by avoiding any time spent on unqualified candidates.

With a single targeted search, recruiters can find and reach out to those most likely interested in a specific position. With so many different personalities and work-ethic preferences, knowing how to categorize them can make it easier for recruiters to identify them among an applicant pool.

Cost per Hire

Using a candidate persona will help you create a recruiting strategy focusing your time and energy on the suitable candidates for each position. You speed up and optimize your persona hiring process, leading to a better cost per hire. 

Employee Retention Rates

Using a recruitment marketing strategy based on candidate persona will help you attract candidates that are an excellent fit for your organization. The candidate persona recruitment process enriches your potential employees with organizational requirements. Informing candidates about what you expect from them contributes to lengthy spells at your company.

You also boost employee retention rates by attracting candidates with the right skills, education, and experience for each position. 

Offer Acceptance Rate

To increase your offer acceptance rate, you need to understand your ideal candidate and what they’re looking for in a role. By creating candidate personas, you can better understand the type of person you should target in your recruitment efforts. 

When your terms align with candidate interests, you boost the acceptance rates. 

Quality of Hire

Using candidate personas will help you recruit the right candidate who will be a good fit for your company and its culture. The candidate personas outline your requirements throughout the recruitment process, making you acquire top candidates for each role. The more specific your personas are, the more effective they attract suitable candidates for each position.

Employer Branding

Employer branding is a marketing strategy that attracts suitable candidates to your organization. Understanding your brand means knowing what your company stands for and what kind of people would be a good fit.

Employer branding aims to increase employee retention and improve recruitment metrics. Once you clearly understand your employer brand, you can create candidate personas. You must engage with your existing employees and attract new talent to achieve your targeted goals. 

Employers who invest time and resources into developing their employer branding can exude power, integrity, and authority with their employees, increasing their workplace appeal.

Steps To Create Effective Job Candidate Personas

Creating compelling job candidate personas requires understanding the value personas add to your recruitment process. Consider the right mix of strategic and tactical steps to execute them successfully. 

First, you must understand what personas are and why they are critical to your recruitment strategy. With that in mind, here are efforts to create effective job candidate personas that will help you effectively recruit the right talent every time.

Research the Role

When creating a persona, you want to be as specific as possible. Research the role of candidates you need in the company. The aspects include day-to-day responsibilities, what skills and experience they would need, and what motivates them. 

By being specific, you can create a realistic and relatable persona, which will help you better understand your target candidates. 

You also have more options for recruiting based on how much detail you provide about the job requirements. For example, if you are looking for someone with four years of experience in a particular field, then search within that range instead of broadening it to ten years or less than one year. 

Here are some of the aspects to consider in your research. 

Expertise & Skills

List any skills or expertise required for the position to know the type of candidates needed for the open positions. Knowing programming languages like Java and Python may be vital if it’s an IT professional for a technology company. 

Consider candidates with different skill sets than your existing team to bring a new dimension to your enterprise. If you need more talent in a specific area of expertise, look into hiring specialized employees such as apprentices or interns. 

Geographical Location

Consider going outside your geographic location to find the perfect candidate who will contribute in ways that are hard to find locally. The candidates could have fantastic resumes but need to learn about openings in your area. 

You’ll also want to decide whether your position is a full-time position or a remote work position. Determining this will help you narrow down the pool of applicants and help you decide on any recruiting efforts needed to get candidates with the right skills. 

You can narrow your search based on the need for full-time employees when open to receiving full-time candidates. Similarly, you incorporate a different approach and recruitment strategy when open to remote working. 

Online Presence

You must research social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram to determine how much time potential candidates spend online. These platforms can provide insight into their type of person and give you more information about how to tailor your recruitment strategy.

You must also go through job sites where your candidate might have applied to jobs or posted resumes online. You will likely find active candidates on such platforms, career sites, and job boards. It’s best to tailor targeted ads on social media platforms for passive candidates. 

Identify Trends

For an effective persona hiring process, you must develop desired characteristics to acquire candidates that meet your needs. By understanding the trends in persona hiring, you can stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your candidate persona is always relevant. 

To save time and money by lowering candidate expenses, you should create niche candidate personas that best fit their needs. Managers can increase job efficiency when searching for candidates by choosing relevant skill sets, education, and experience levels.

Here are areas to identify trends for creating a compelling job candidate persona.

Demographic Information

Use demographics to help you create the right candidate regarding age, gender, current job title, location, and income. 

You’ll also want to consider how much experience a candidate has compared to the role they wish to take. Employers prefer candidates with more experience than the role needs since new hires are more likely to make costly mistakes and leave their positions shortly after starting them.

These are essential factors that hiring managers consider, as specific demographic characteristics can impact an individual’s work performance. By combining this with experience levels and future job growth, hiring managers can find candidates that will be a good fit for their organization.

Background

When researching, you may also want to understand more about your candidate’s educational and professional background. The candidate persona also includes information about the candidate’s academic experience and program/degree courses. 

In that case, you’ll want to create your candidate persona from information that includes education, professional experience, and individual personality traits. The goal is to find someone with both relatable and complementary qualifications.

For example, if they studied at a specific university or hold a certain degree, this will give you an idea of where they learned their skills and expertise and what career path they followed. These insights can tailor the job description and help create interview questions accordingly.

Qualifications 

You should learn about the candidate’s skills and certifications. Evaluating qualifications will help you create a more relatable candidate with relevant skills and experiences aligned with your organization and brand. 

This info will guide you in determining your hiring criteria and desired approach for the position.  

The coursework completed will affect what skills and abilities a person has acquired. For example, a Google certification would be relevant in your job descriptions if you’re in digital marketing. 

Personal Attributes

By understanding personal attributes such as the candidate’s motivation, knowledge of the organization, and work style preferences, you can better understand how they will perform in your organization’s culture and structure. 

You’ll want to research these traits to understand what qualities are essential for your company. Once you have a list of relevant personal attributes, create a short list that describes the candidate. 

Remember that each detail is not equally important, so prioritize them based on their relevance to your business needs. For example, if someone has experience with marketing materials, you may need to pay attention to an inability to handle conflict well.

Evaluate candidate strengths, weaknesses, and interests to help you select ideal candidates. In addition, compare your team’s skill set against those required by open positions to see where there are gaps. Use this information when creating job descriptions and advertising opportunities.

Goals

By knowing the candidate’s career goals, you can be sure that you attract the correct type of candidate for your open position. By determining your hiring goals, you’ll be able to target candidates with the skills and experience needed to meet these goals.

Values

Understanding the candidate’s values is essential to help you determine if they fit your company’s culture well. Use your research to understand what matters to them and what motivates them. If they don’t share the same values, look elsewhere for a candidate who will be suitable for your organization.

Pain Points

Creating personas for your ideal job candidates can help you better understand the specific problems they will ultimately solve or address. Establishing pain points can help create a more targeted and effective recruiting campaign that reduces hiring costs.

Web Activity

Another important aspect is their web activity. You can better understand candidates’ online persona by researching their social media and online presence. They may share lots of content on social media or advocate for specific causes that relate to your organization, which can help you better understand what they are like in person. 

Interview Stakeholders and Team Members

Introduce the candidate to your entire team so they know how to discuss the position with potential candidates. This interview examines how effective a potential employee will be in their field for your organization. During your interviews, you must include all stakeholders and team members to better understand the job role and the candidate. 

The interview allows team members and stakeholders to provide candidate opinions and requirements aligned with team goals. For example, you may need feedback from a recruiting and hiring department. Interviewing stakeholders and team members is an easy way to understand better what the candidate can provide for your organization.

This interview discusses educational qualifications, skills, experience, personality traits, and cognitive ability. Ensure you administer tests that comply with federal guidelines.

This interview determines how candidates perceive themselves and their personality and gauges personality types. Additionally, this assesses the applicant’s history with past employers and job performance. 

The interview can compare the applicant’s personality to team members and company employees with similar or dissimilar roles or characters. The interview helps an employer determine if a candidate fits your organization’s goals and objectives.

Define the Candidate’s Persona

After researching and understanding potential candidates, you will want to create a persona for the job candidate. This information serves as a baseline or template for you while conducting interviews and setting up your interview questions. 

Having gained much information through research and stakeholder interviews, you will want to trim down the data to create an ideal candidate persona. Start by narrowing down what’s essential to the person you want to hire by weeding out qualities that don’t matter. Then use non-essential qualities to trim down the candidates you’ve identified with the key traits.

Decide on at least five to ten relevant criteria for this role. After your hiring team has agreed upon your final selection criteria, organize them into sections or categories. Using an image and graphics will accomplish the job nicely, and you can also opt to use a text file which also works fine.

Interview for the Candidate Persona

When you’ve created a candidate persona, you should optimize it and make your hard work worth the effort. It would help if you introduced your target candidate persona to your recruitment marketing efforts, including job descriptions and social media. 

Coming up with interview questions takes work. However, with a well-defined candidate persona, you’ll be able to craft them tailored to suitable roles. You’re looking for the best candidate for each position, and people are trying to find the best career. 

Expect potential candidates to ask questions about the role and company. Be bold and ask questions during the interview about candidate preferences so that you continue to improve your recruitment process.

After your interview, it is best to determine whether or not the candidate excelled at one of your fundamental values. You can also look for other areas that show strengths and weaknesses, including previous work experience, education, and job skills.

What Next?

A well-defined persona will help create a more targeted and effective recruiting strategy. You’ll be able to give each potential applicant what they want by highlighting relevant parts of your company culture, benefits package, and more. 

This persona recruitment guide gives you a better understanding of creating a compelling job candidate persona. Following the steps outlined here, you can create a persona to help you target suitable candidates for your open positions.