Générez 5x plus de candidats qualifiés
Define a candidate persona to have a clear idea of the profile you are looking for has become essential for effective recruitment. In recent years, recruiters have adopted marketing techniques to attract the best active and passive candidates (this is the principle of human resources marketing). Building the employer brand and improving the candidate experience highlight the culture and values of the company. They can be very effective as long as the team has designed these elements keeping in mind the persona of their candidate.
What is the candidate persona ?
Very similar to the buyer persona used in marketing and sales, HubSpot defines the candidate persona as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Replace the term “customer” with “candidate” and then “employee” and you know just about everything you need to know.
A persona candidate is therefore “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidate based on market research and real data on your existing employees.” In other words, It's the robot portrait of your future employees.
Why create a candidate persona? 🤔
Imagine that your candidate is the framework that will guide your team's creative activities. Defining your Candidate persona before marketing and recruiting operations start will save you and your team a lot of time in the long run by ensuring that these campaigns are well-suited to the individuals you want to attract.
With a clear idea of the type of candidates to target, you can find sources of information with absolute precision!
The key here is research! But with so much information available in this digital world, it can be complicated to know where to start.
That's why we've put together this guide for targeting your audience so you can start finding the best candidates for your business.
How do you create your candidate persona?
You can use your job descriptions, your job offers, a study of your current employees or even an external source such as the Labour Market Information and Statistics website - You can search for a profession or a sector of activity in a specific region and obtain information as varied as the description of the job or sector, required and available training courses or even demographic statistics, etc.
The steps to create a good candidate persona
1. Create your checklist
Below are a few sample questions, similar to the questions salespeople and marketers ask when defining their buyer persona.
- What social network does my candidate use?
- What types of music and podcasts does my candidate listen to?
- What is the status of my candidate's career (Junior, Manager, Senior, etc.)?
- What is the biggest project my candidate has ever undertaken?
- What are my candidate's professional goals?
- What are the benefits that my candidate cares about?
- What does my candidate do for fun?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of my candidate.
⚠ The questions your team uses to define a candidate's persona should not encourage bias. Discriminatory criteria such as age, marital status, religion, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, should not be key factors. For example, you can't say, “The ideal candidate is a 35-year-old married man who goes to church every Sunday.” Even some less protected criteria such as education level should be set aside if the position could be filled by someone with equivalent experience.
Then, try to create this Candidate Persona by keeping the following data in mind.
• Personal interests (what your target candidate likes, watches, listens to, or even buys)
• Courses or fields of study
• Place of residence (Country, Region, City)
• Similar or related positions (positions your target may have occupied or may be interested in)
• Similar or related businesses (businesses you would like to hire or that may be of interest to your target audience)
• Others (details and characteristics about the ideal candidate's profile).
2. Analyze your current talents
Today's employees know better than anyone what the company has to offer and what it lacks. The aim is to be as specific as possible to create a better marketing and recruitment strategy, so it's best to offer anonymity to ensure honest answers.
Look for people within the company (or outside if it's a new role) who have already proven themselves in this position. Talk to them to understand what motivated them to join the company, their level of experience when they were recruited, and if they know of any groups of online professionals you could contact to find out more.
3. Use your resume database
When using your resume database, be sure to check your assumptions. Let's say you're looking for keywords to bring up candidates, add the resumes of people who have already been hired for this position to see if they appear in your search, otherwise, this search would lose all of its value.
4. Go to the internet
Analyze the online behavior of some of the best candidates identified in your database, taking into account the type of content they share on social networks and with whom they do it, their activities, their groups, etc. All of these elements can provide information about their motivations and interests.
If you go to an online forum, be sure to be respectful of the space and opt for the role of “silent observer.” If you start spamming the group, you will be expelled and recruiters will no longer be allowed to do so.
Here is a visual example of a candidate persona, you are free to adapt it to your activity and target.
And now? 🤷🏻 ♀️
Once you've completed your questionnaire and feel like you know your persona inside out, it's time to start the final phase.
It is interesting to start by having an idea of the size of the audience that can be reached. Concretely, “How many people correspond to my ideal candidate?” For example, use the Candidate Audience Calculator which allows you to obtain an accurate estimate of the number of active and passive potential candidates who meet your persona criteria. This allows you to know if your persona is credible or if you are looking for the 5-legged sheep...
Then, use what you've learned to communicate effectively with these candidates, both content and channel.
This can mean finding the right job site (see Jobboard Finder) or reconfigure your career page to make the application process easier. Maybe your candidate likes a certain type of YouTube video and in that case, you can advertise on it, or maybe they are addicted to handmade sweets and you can then set up a stand in your local market.
One of the most effective ways to reach your ideal candidates today is to use targeted advertising. This technology allows you to broadcast your job opportunities and/or your employer brand, directly on the sites, applications and social networks on which your active and passive candidates browse every day. To set up these promotional campaigns, you can either dedicate someone to do this work manually, or use a programmatic HR solution like Seeqle which will automatically target your future candidates on thousands of sites and applications.
Be creative, the sky is the limit! ☁️
Try our free analysis tool which will give you the size of your audience detected on the entire web as well as the number of candidates you will receive.
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