7 Questions to Help You Choose Your Talent Audience Personas

For more advice on creating talent audience personas, you can find Give & Get Employer Branding on Amazon.

Dove’s antiperspirant comes in two variations: a black one for men and a white one for women. The messaging and presentation of the product is subtly different on each label, despite the product being the same.

Why does Dove do this? Because they understand the power of creating a brand experience that is tailored to each segment of their audience.

You must approach your employer brand in the same way. Each segment of your talent audience has different priorities, preferences, and perspectives. If you know what they are, you can match your communications to them with much greater effect.

One of the most effective ways to better understand your talent audience is to create personas—an archetypal representation of each audience segment. Depending on your company, you might identify anything from four to twenty-four different personas.

Choosing your talent audience personas can be a challenge, especially for large companies with many different roles. Here are seven questions to help you identify the most pressing and priority personas to develop first.

#1: What new talent are you hiring for or will be hiring for soon that you haven’t hired in the past? 

As your organization changes, it’s not uncommon to have to hire new positions that you are not familiar with at all. For that to be a successful endeavor, we highly recommended adding these groups of roles to your priority list. 

These roles are a top priority because, in comparison to other roles at your company, you have very little information about the target talent audience. Creating a persona will allow you to learn more about who you wish to attract and how to do so.

#2: What people do you hire for who tend to have a much higher attrition rate than general? 

If there is a group with a higher attrition rate than normal, it suggests there’s a challenge with expectations, environmental conditions, or something that’s not being suitably satisfied for them to stay longer.

By creating a persona, you can identify the underlying issues causing the attrition and take steps to resolve them.

#3: What groups of talent consistently take an above-average time or cost to hire? 

If you are spending more time or money than average to hire certain groups, it indicates that you could benefit from a greater level of insight to find and attract suitable people in a more effective and efficient manner. 

This could be simply discovering where they typically hang out online, or even finding insights that could help drive referral campaigns internally, and so forth. Creating a persona can help you uncover that understanding.

#4: What groups of people consistently score low on employee engagement surveys? 

Persona mapping the groups of people who consistently score low on employee engagement surveys can be incredibly revealing. 

First, this persona mapping can provide answers to how you could optimize the working environment better for these people. Second, it can help you learn more about character traits, personality types, or experience that could make all the difference in how you engage and reward these people or how you choose to bring them in or screen them out during their candidate experience.

#5: What roles are you always hiring for? 

Sometimes the volume hires are overlooked because the numbers are consistent and there is not an obvious problem or challenge with how it’s going. However, this group of people could be responsible for defining your culture the most and even helping you find more talent around them. 

As such, if you take the time to develop these personas, it could have a huge impact on your attraction and retention performance, year on year.

#6: What roles are becoming increasingly more difficult to fill or retain? 

Sometimes there are roles in your organization that are becoming more and more difficult to fill due to a rise in competition, a change in industry, politics, or the economy. 

Whatever the reason, it’s beneficial to get ahead of the challenge. The more you know about this audience segment, the better, for obvious reasons.

#7: Is there any group of people you consistently lose to a specific competitor? 

If the answer to this question is yes and your organization happens to value that group of people, it’s a priority contender for persona development. 

In many organizations we’ve worked with, talent flow between specific talent competitors is a vital employer brand metric. If you’re hemorrhaging key parts of your workforce, persona mapping can help you stop the bleeding.

Begin Persona Development

Once you identify your priority talent audience segments, you can begin developing the personas, looking at the personality and character, behaviors and values, goals, and more for these segments.

Your business and the world at large is constantly changing, so once a year, ask yourself these same questions again, to determine whether you need to add to or update your personas.

By taking the time to identify and understand each priority persona, you can discover the unique motivators, drivers, preferences, and priorities behind each one so that when it comes to communicating and engaging with them, you know what, when, where, and how to deliver a message in the most meaningful and relevant way possible. The end result will be better, more effective talent acquisition and higher employee engagement. 

For more advice on creating talent audience personas, you can find Give & Get Employer Branding on Amazon.

?Charlotte Marshall was named the 2019-2020 Employer Brand Leader of the Year and has successfully built and launched five Fortune 500 employer brands. She is an in-demand international speaker and the global employer brand lead at Danaher Corporation.

Bryan Adams is the CEO and founder of Ph.Creative, recognized as one of the leading employer brand agencies in the world with clients such as Apple, American Airlines, GVC, and Blizzard Entertainment. Bryan is also a bestselling author, podcaster, creative strategist, and specialist speaker.