Creating a candidate persona doesn’t have to be complicated, follow our step-by-step guide to create your candidate profile and streamline the recruiting process.
1. Clarify your goals
The first step in creating candidate personas is to define your recruiting goals. Ask yourself, what do you hope to get out of this? For example:
- Find the perfect candidate
- Promote employer brand
- Speed up recruitment
- Optimize the interview process
- Build the right team
Your objectives will help you clarify your candidate persona, so it’s important to define it at the outset.
2. Consider your competition
Getting ahead of your competition starts with conducting thorough research on your competitors. Explore how they position themselves, their key products, and their employer brand.
You should also try to understand the type of candidates they are trying to attract, look at job boards and gauge the candidates they are targeting. Recruitment management systems can also be used to evaluate the strategies they employ.
3. Research your target audience
Gather relevant data about potential candidates' skills, motivations, ambitions and preferences.
You can start by asking hiring managers what kind of talent they are looking for, asking about the basic technical and soft skills required for the job and the characteristics of current successful employees. You can also gather feedback from existing employees to find out what qualities they value in a team. View the profiles of candidates who have previously performed well in the role you are recruiting for. Look for common characteristics, skills, or experiences that may have contributed to their success.
Gathering data from multiple sources can help you paint a more complete picture of your ideal candidate.
4. Analyze and validate data
Once the data has been collected, it's time to analyze it. Look for skills or attributes that reoccur, and you should also note any holes in your analysis. Maybe the hiring manager is looking for different traits than their peers, and you may need to use other data, such as competitor analysis, to complete your evaluation.
By comprehensively analyzing the data you collect, you can uncover valuable insights that can help you refine your recruiting strategy, spread your employer brand, and attract top talent more effectively than your competitors.
Once you've reached your initial conclusions, go back and confirm your findings with key stakeholders—especially the hiring manager and colleagues involved in the hiring process. This process ensures that your candidate personas are both data-driven and recognized by those involved in recruiting.
5. Create a detailed candidate persona
Once you've completed your analysis, you can move on to building your candidate profile.
First, list the key elements your candidate persona needs to include:
- qualifications
- Skill
- Character traits
- communication method
- acculturation
Exactly what your candidate profile includes will depend on your role and industry. For example, when recruiting for a software engineering role, you may want to describe technical skills in particular detail.
Continue to fill in these sections with characteristics you discovered in your research. Try to imagine how the candidate will fit into your team and organizational culture, and consider how their skills and personality traits will complement the existing team to complete the candidate persona creation.
Skill:
It’s unlikely that one candidate’s role will fit every open position in your organization. Think about what most of the roles you recruit for have in common, especially in terms of soft skills or cultural fit, and use this as a basis to tailor your candidates to each specific role.
6. Use candidate personas
Once you've created a good persona, it's time to put it into practice:
- Tailor job postings to job seekers’ personalities
- Tie your interview questions to the traits you are looking for
- Compare the skills in the candidate's resume to those highlighted in the role
- Jot down ideas on how to communicate your employer brand to attract your ideal candidates
- Target recruitment marketing efforts on platforms where ideal candidates are likely to be active, such as specific job boards, industry events, or social media channels.
With personalized communications based on candidate personas, you can have more meaningful interactions with candidates in your talent pipeline, reducing time to fill positions, hiring more candidates from diverse backgrounds, and increasing hire rates.
7. Keep an open mind
Although the goal is to find candidates who are as close to the specification as possible, it's important to keep an open mind. Relying too much on stereotyped roles can lead to tunnel vision, and you may miss out on candidates who don’t exactly fit the role but have other valuable traits.
You don’t want to overlook candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. These candidates have the potential to bring unique perspectives and new solutions. When evaluating candidates, it’s important to consider transferable skills, learning abilities, and growth mindset rather than an ideal candidate profile.
8. Perfect candidate personas
The job market is changing rapidly, and your candidate personas should too. Leverage feedback from the hiring process, candidate and new hire performance data, and ongoing market research to continuously refine and adjust candidate personas.
Summarize
Candidate personas are a powerful tool that can speed up your hiring process, helping you consider the attributes that matter while focusing your efforts on high-quality candidates. The process of creating candidate personas is unique to every business. However, collecting and analyzing relevant data is a critical step in any character creation process. Once you've crafted your candidate personas, make sure your recruiting process is consistent with your conclusions. Taken together, candidate personas can help your organization succeed in an ever-changing job market.