Persona-based recruiting is the key to finding the right candidates that suit your company. It’s a research-driven approach to creating the ideal employee persona (much like you would make a customer persona) and building a profile of the type of person you need – their educational and professional background, skills and expertise, personality traits, and even career aspirations and main motivators.
Once you know the employee characteristics that fit your company culture, you’ll have an easier time finding them. Instead of simply looking at a candidate’s CV and making hiring decisions based on gut feeling, you’d use facts and data to empower your recruitment process.
The Benefits of Persona-based Recruiting
Creating candidate personas can improve the recruiting process and enable you to make accurate predictions on how good of a match an applicant is for your company. It offers an abundance of benefits that can charge the growth of your business.
a) Attract the right talent
Knowing exactly the type of employee you need makes it much easier to find them. You can tailor your job ads and create descriptions that speak to your ideal candidates. You can deduce where you can source the best candidates, understand how you can appeal to them, and learn how to incentivize them.
With the help of AI-based recruitment tools, you can ensure that it’s not only the candidates that are ideal for your company but that your company is ideal for them.
b) Strengthen company culture
Although you can certainly guide the company culture in your preferred direction, it’s your employees who shape it. They’re the ones who dictate the formal and informal behaviors, values, and overall company ethos. Each new person you add to the workplace (or remove from it) will impact how the organizational culture develops.
Therefore, to strengthen your company culture and ensure it’s heading in the right direction, you must attract employees who intrinsically share your values, beliefs, and attitudes. This process is simplified with persona-based recruiting.
c) Decrease turnover rates
Considering that high turnovers are expected to cost US companies over $430 billion annually by 2030, ensuring that a candidate is a right fit for your company even before they’re hired is the key to improving retention and reducing your costs.
When a company and a candidate are a perfect fit, it’s easier to improve employee satisfaction rates, meet employee career goals, and identify problems before they arise. With the help of data-driven HR tools, you can take note of employee trends and create a workplace that meets all expectations, attracts the best applicants, and retains the top employees with ease.
d) Save time, money, and resources on recruiting
Perhaps the most significant benefit of data-driven persona-based recruiting is that it helps you improve all relevant recruitment metrics. You’ll improve your application completion rates, time to hire, offer acceptance rates, and quality of hire. Ultimately, you’ll reduce the cost per hire as you’ll have a smaller yet more qualified pool of applicants to go through.
How to create candidate personas
To create candidate personas and enjoy the benefits of persona-based recruiting, you need the proper data collection and analysis tools.
As mentioned, you cannot rely on your gut feeling when making your hiring decisions, which means you cannot rely on your gut feeling when building candidate personas. You need data.
Collect historical data on your current top performers. Identify where you sourced your best talent. Send out surveys to collect unstructured data on what makes your best employees stay. Create personality tests to assess top employee characteristics. Analyze employment trends to learn how you can attract the best candidates.
Be as detailed as possible and create as many candidate personas as you need. Depending on your needs, vacant positions, employee structure, and roles and responsibilities of your future candidates, you might need distinct personas for each new hire.
Final thoughts
Persona-based recruiting allows you to find quality new hires that turn into loyal employees. It allows you to find applicants that are well-suited to your company and gives you a chance to create a workplace environment that is well-suited to your employees.
