Personas for Talent Acquisition

In my recent SourceCon keynote session in Dallas, I shared how Kforce has started leveraging personas for our hiring initiatives. If you don’t know what personas are, don’t worry – you are not alone.  

Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your target audience.

In consumer marketing, the target audience is made up of customers and prospects. For talent acquisition, personas represent your target candidates.

Personas allow you to be more strategic in catering to each target, relate to the talent/client contact that you are trying to attract and recruit, and relate to them as human beings. 

The marketing industry has used personas in many areas of their strategy for years, and I believe we should be using them for recruiting and talent attraction.

As you read through the different areas marketing uses personas above, you can see how our industry could put them to good use too. The first four are self-explanatory. Recruiters and sourcers need to be doing this every day with their candidates and applicants. Our "products" are career sites, job descriptions, employer branding videos, talent acquisition campaigns, etc. and once we understand our personas, we can use what we know about them to guide product development. Those projects tend to involve other teams in your organization, so the 6th area, "Get in sync" is also quite important for effective and efficient collaboration.

Personas can be used in the many areas of talent acquisition (see cover photo above). From talent attraction strategies to candidate engagement to onboarding and training your new hires, possibilities for using personas abound.

The key is creating detailed candidate personas based on research – they shouldn’t be made up of weak assumptions, and they are definitely not a “wish list” of traits you want your ideal candidate to have.

To create a persona, gather information from your actual candidates and top performers (through surveys, interviews, etc.). Ideally, you will define the following about your persona:

At SourceCon, someone asked how to gather this information. My recommendation is to work on it daily; have a persona template up on your screen, and throughout the day as you are talking with candidates and top performers, doing research, participating in relevant online groups etc., fill out the sections. In other words, ask questions, pay attention to the answers, and document.

It does not have to be a daunting task – just start with one. I recommend the following steps to get started:

1. Gather information from your candidates
2. Interview top performers
3. Document and organize your information
4. Craft messaging and social media posts
5. Test it
6. Continuously improve

After you have created your persona, take her for a test drive! Your new persona is a work in progress, and you will likely need to make tweaks and adjustments as you leverage your persona. I encourage you to organize your personas and build up a library so that all team members can benefit from them.

Are you using personas? Please comment below. Thanks for reading!